Spatial Disaggregation of Coarse Soil Moisture Data by Using High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Vegetation Products

A novel approach is presented to spatially disaggregate coarse soil moisture (SM) by only using remotely sensed vegetation index. The approach is based on the conditional relationship of vegetation with time-aggregated SM, allowing the coarse-scale SM to be disaggregated to the spatial resolution of the vegetation product. The method was applied to satellite-derived SM over January 2010–December 2011, using the high-resolution normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The results were evaluated against ground measurements during the two-year period over the contiguous United States and Spain, and also compared with an existing disaggregation method that also requires land surface temperature observations. It is shown that the proposed approach can provide fine-resolution SM with reasonable spatial variability.

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