Predicting root zone soil moisture with satellite near-surface moisture data in semiarid environments

Abstract:

One of the most critical variables in semiarid environment is the soil water content that represents a controlling factor for both ecological and hydrological processes. Soil moisture monitoring over large scales may be extremely useful, but it is limited by the fact that most of the available tools provides only surface measurements not representative of the effective amount of water stored in the subsurface. Therefore, a methodology able to infer root-zone soil moisture starting from surface measurements is highly desirable. Recently a new simplified formulation has been introduced to provide a formal description of the mathematical relationship between surface measurements and root-zone soil moisture (Manfreda et al., HESS 2014). This is a physically based approach derived from the soil water balance equation, where different soil water loss functions have been explored in order to take into account for the non-linear processes governing soil water fluxes. The study highlighted that the soil loss function is the key for such relationship that is therefore strongly influenced by soil type and physiological plant types. The new formulation has been tested on soil moisture based on measurements taken from the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) and the Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) databases. The method sheds lights on the physical controls for soil moisture dynamics and on the possibility to use such a simplified method for the description of root-zone soil moisture. Furthermore, the method has been also couple with an Enasamble Kalman Filter (EnKF) in order to optimize its performances for the large scale monitoring based the new satellite near-surface moisture data (SMAP). The optimized SMAR-EnKF model does well in both wet and dry climates and across many different soil types (51 SCAN locations) providing a strategy for real-time soil moisture monitoring.