Applications of Satellite Soil Moisture for Climate-Related Agricultural Risk Assessment

English Abstract:

Agricultural production is impacted by adverse climate events, from excess moisture, excess heat and drought. The complexity of quantifying these events, particularly spatial variation in precipitation, often means that a multi-variate approach is the best means of determining emerging risk events. Satellite based data has long been proposed as a solution to data gaps in climate-related risk assessment, but the application of this data to climate-related risk reporting and monitoring is sporadic. The short term nature of satellite-based data sets and the different sources of error in satellite based measurements from traditional meteorological station data make the integration of these data sets into routine monitoring and reporting often problematic. This research examines the application of satellite soil moisture to climate-related production risk reporting in Canada, and explores means of using satellite soil moisture information to report on adverse weather events in near real time. Previous research has shown that at provincial and regional scales, satellite soil moisture anomalies are sensitive to risk events defined by through a multi-variate risk assessment approach, but that there is a low threshold separating wet-normal-dry events. This paper looks at improving this sensitivity through a time integration approach to better define risk events spatially and ranking them by severity. Improved methods of extracting excess moisture, emerging drought and crop specific soil moisture information are explored to make this information more descriptive of risk events in the agricultural sector. Examples using the SMOS surface soil moisture data set applied to climate related production risk events in Canada in the 2010-2014 are examined.