Soil moisture mapping using SMAP and Sentinel-1 data

Poster was presented at 10th International Workshop on “Advances in the Science and Applications of SAR Interferometry and Sentinel-1 InSAR" (FRINGE 2017), Helsinki, Finland, 5-9 June 2017

Soil moisture data is essential for planning agricultural activities, crop condition monitoring and drought prediction.

InSAR remote sensing technology offers a means of measuring surface soil moisture, however temporal and spatial data resolution is crucial for effective remote sensing soil moisture data integration in decision making. NASA SMAP mission provides volumetric measurement of water content in surface soil with three day revisit time producing to the wide number of time series with global coverage. But since the loss of radar there are only low spatial resolution data products of 40 km is available from SMAP radiometer.

The aim of the research was to assess the feasibility of combined use of Sentinel-1 and SMAP data for soil moisture

mapping. L3_SM_40km Gridded Radiometer Brightness Temperature / Soil Moisture and Sentinel-1A images were selected for merge application. The resulted merged data product time series were developed for the vegetation period (June –September 2016) and compared with the precipitation data from gauging stations over Ukraine (fig.1).

The correlation of soil moisture distribution from merged SMAP/Sentinel-1 data was demonstrated. Developed soil moisture maps were included in weekly bulletin of

environmental conditions for crop production.