Assessment and Combination of SMAP and Sentinel-1A/B-Derived Soil Moisture Estimates With Land Surface Model Outputs in the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain, USA

Prediction of large-scale water-related natural disasters such as droughts, floods, wildfires, landslides, and dust outbreaks can benefit from the high spatial resolution soil moisture (SM) data of satellite and modeled products because antecedent SM conditions in the topsoil layer govern the partitioning of precipitation into infiltration and runoff. SM data retrieved from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) have proved to be an effective method of monitoring SM content at different spatial resolutions: 1) radiometer-based product gridded at 36 km; 2) radiometer-only enhanced posting product gridded at 9 km; and 3) SMAP/Sentinel-1A/B products at 3 and 1 km. In this article, we focused on 9-, 3-, and 1-km SM products: three products were validated against in situ data using conventional and triple collocation analysis (TCA) statistics and were then merged with a Noah-Multiparameterization version-3.6 (NoahMP36) land surface model (LSM). An exponential filter and a cumulative density function (CDF) were applied for further evaluation of the three SM products, and the maximize-R method was applied to combine SMAP and NoahMP36 SM data. CDF-matched 9-, 3-, and 1-km SMAP SM data showed reliable performance: R and ubRMSD values of the CDF-matched SMAP products were 0.658, 0.626, and 0.570 and 0.049, 0.053, and 0.055 m
³
/m
³
, respectively. When SMAP and NoahMP36 were combined, the R-values for the 9-, 3-, and 1-km SMAP SM data were greatly improved: R-values were 0.825, 0.804, and 0.795, and ubRMSDs were 0.034, 0.036, and 0.037 m
³
/m
³
, respectively. These results indicate the potential uses of SMAP/Sentinel data for improving regional-scale SM estimates and for creating further applications of LSMs with improved accuracy.