A method of integrating ATI with VSWI to retrieve soil moisture in Shiyang River Basin

Mounting evidence suggests that the complex interactions between soil, vegetation, and the atmosphere play a larger role in regulating atmospheric conditions than initially assumed. Soil moisture is an important parameter in a variety of environmental processes, such as the global hydrologic cycle and the functioning of ecosystems. It is a key variable in controlling the exchange of water and heat energy between the land surface and the atmosphere through evaporation and plant transpiration. Its information is valuable to a wide range of fields concerned with weather and climate, runoff potential and flood control, soil erosion and slope failure, reservoir management, geotechnical engineering, water quality, and etc.; yet, information on soil moisture at large scales is meager. It is of interest to retrieve soil moisture by method of remote sensing. In this study, according to the characteristics of ATI and VSWI, a retrieval method of soil moisture that integrated ATI with VSWI was utilized in an example of the Shiyang River Basin. The results indicate that the soil moisture extremely anatomizes with the local reality in the spatial distribution, and the average error is 9.089%, the biggest error is no more than 13.410%, the smallest error is only 2.951%. So this method can effectively make up for the ATI and VSWI inherent deficiencies and achieve complement of their advantages to improve the accuracy of the retrieval. It is worth promoting.