Evaluating High Resolution Soil Moisture Maps in the Framework of the ESA CCI

Abstract

Despite the current short temporal coverage of high spatial resolution SM maps estimated from Synthetic Aperture Radars such as Sentinel-1(S1), their evaluation is important in the context of the ESA CCI as potential future high resolution (HR) SM long time series, and also as benchmarking references for HR SM data sets that could be obtained by downscaling coarser resolution sensors. In this context, 1 km HR SM maps obtained making a synergistic use of S 1 and Sentinel 2 (or Sentinel 3) using the S{2}MP algorithm were compared to the HR SM data sets from the Copernicus Global Land Service produced from S 1 data over three regions in Europe and one in Tunisia. In addition, the S{2}MP maps were also compared to the SMAP+S 1 downscaled product in those regions and in two additional ones in North America and Australia. The HR SM maps show an overall good agreement for croplands and herbaceous land covers while showing significant differences for other land cover classes. All the 1 km SM maps data sets, in addition to coarse scale SMAP, SMOS and CCI data, were evaluated against in-situ measurements. The results show that the HR products are in good agreement but they show a lower correlation with respect to in-situ data than the coarse resolution products.