Elsevier

Remote Sensing of Environment

Volume 247, 15 September 2020, 111914
Remote Sensing of Environment

SMAP underestimates soil moisture in vegetation-disturbed areas primarily as a result of biased surface temperature data

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111914Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The effects of NDVI climatology on SMAP soil moisture retrieval are evaluated.

  • Multiple global soil moisture datasets are used to obtain consistent results.

  • SMAP underestimates soil moisture in global vegetation-disturbed areas.

  • The underestimations are related to negative biases in MERRA temperature data.

  • The underestimations might amplify global soil moisture drying trends.

Abstract

The Soil Moisture Active Mission (SMAP) baseline V-pol single channel algorithm (SCA-V) retrieves soil moisture (SM) based on the 2000–2010 Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) climatology. This parameterization scheme might affect SM retrievals in the context of vegetation disturbances, e.g., as a result of drought. By referencing the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI), the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) L3 (SMOS-L3) and the SMOS-IC SM datasets, this study investigated the effects of SMAP vegetation parameterization on SMAP–reference SM differences in global land areas that are subject to differing vegetation disturbances. The results show that SMAP might underestimate SM by ~0.007 m3·m−3 for a relative NDVI decrease of 10%. The underestimation might be primarily caused by low biases in the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) surface temperature. Although using NDVI climatology might cause an overestimation of SM (due to an overestimation of vegetation effects and an underestimation of surface roughness effects), the concurrent underestimation of the GMAO surface temperature might cause an even larger underestimation of SM. The vegetation biases, particularly the surface temperature biases, should be considered for SMAP SM retrieval. These results have implications for future updates of SMAP SCA-V and applications of time series SMAP SM data for hydroecological studies, especially in the future, which is projected to have strong and long-lasting droughts.

Introduction

Soil moisture (SM) provides water resources for global land evapotranspiration and has strong coupling with regional precipitation (Koster et al., 2004). SM can be modulated by vegetation type and biomass (Zhang et al., 2001; Kim and Wang, 2007), and vegetation correction is a critical step in the remote sensing of SM. Since the 1970s, satellite microwave remote sensing has initiated the age of global SM products (Njoku and Kong, 1977; Choudhury et al., 1979; Mo et al., 1982). The brightness temperature (TB) acquired from passive microwave radiometers consists of signal contributions from the soil surface and the overlying vegetation. To retrieve SM, vegetation effects are generally characterized by the vegetation optical depth (VOD or τ) and single scattering albedo (ω) parameters in τ-ω models (Schwank et al., 2018). As inferred from these models, an overestimation of vegetation effects might cause SM overestimation.

Launched in 2015, the L-band Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission has provided a state-of-the-art global SM dataset. This dataset has seen extensive applications in global/regional evapotranspiration estimations (Purdy et al., 2018; Walker et al., 2019a), especially drought assessment (Liu et al., 2017; Mishra et al., 2017; Eswar et al., 2018; Sadri et al., 2018). The current SMAP baseline V-pol single channel algorithm (SCA-V) corrects for vegetation effects based on the 2000–2010 Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) climatology (O'Neill et al., 2018). Vegetation water content (VWC) is estimated with a quadratic function of NDVI plus a vegetation type-dependent term for stem water content. VWC is then converted to VOD using a vegetation structure-dependent b-factor (Wigneron et al., 2017). Climatology-based parameterization has known impacts on SM retrieval, especially over areas with significant seasonal vegetation changes, e.g., croplands in the US Corn Belt (Walker et al., 2019b). Large errors are found at rapid vegetation growing stages due to interannual differences in vegetation health and phenology (Zwieback et al., 2018; Colliander et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2019). Both positive and negative NDVI anomalies can occur due to the earlier and later vegetation growing stages relative to the phenology implied in the 2000–2010 mean NDVI climatology.

Most of the current studies evaluate SMAP SM in terms of the correlation coefficient (R), bias, root mean square error (RMSE) and unbiased RMSE (ubRMSE) (Chan et al., 2016) and further investigate the dependence of these metrics on land use land cover (LULC), climate zone and other factors of interest (Ma et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019). In addition to time-invariant errors, recent studies also assess time-dependent errors as a result of the mismatch between the actual and climatological mean NDVI (Dong et al., 2018; Zwieback et al., 2018). To our best knowledge, however, few studies have evaluated the effects of interannual (compared to seasonal) vegetation changes on SMAP SM retrieval. Since the beginning of this century, drought has been claimed to cause vegetation disturbances (Pan et al., 2018; Wigneron et al., 2020). The affected land has lower NDVI values than the 2000–2010 climatology, indicating an overestimation of vegetation effects in the current SMAP SCA-V and therefore an overestimation of SMAP SM.

The primary objective of this study is to investigate the dependence of SMAP–reference SM differences on interannual NDVI changes in global vegetation-disturbed areas and the potential causal factors of such a dependency. To this end, the reference products included the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) SM, the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) SM, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) L3 (SMOS-L3) SM and the SMOS-IC SM datasets. These datasets are independent of, are less dependent on, or are relatively insensitive to vegetation index climatology, differing from the SMAP SM dataset, which corrects for vegetation effects depending exclusively on the MODIS NDVI climatology. The hypothesis is that SMAP–reference SM differences can reveal the effects of vegetation biases on SMAP SM and the total SMAP–reference SM differences might increase with vegetation biases. The main results of this study are expected to have implications for SMAP SCA-V updates and global drought monitoring using the SMAP SM dataset.

Section snippets

MODIS NDVI

High-quality NDVI can be derived from MODIS red and near-infrared bands observations. The MODIS 16-day vegetation indices dataset was produced with a constraint view angle-maximum value compositing algorithm (Didan et al., 2015). In this study, the 0.05° × 0.05° Terra MODIS NDVI data (MOD13C1, C006) from 2000 to 2018 were collected from the Level-1 and Atmosphere Archive & Distribution System (LAADS) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC). For each year from 2000 to 2018, the annual maximum

Global distribution of vegetation-disturbed areas

Compared to the 2000–2010 climatology (Fig. A1), the relative NDVI changes from 2015 to 2018 are shown in Fig. 1. Large NDVI decreases are observed in tropical forests in Africa and India, likely caused by the 2015–2016 El Niño event (Wigneron et al., 2020). Drought might be a major cause of global NDVI decreases (Fig. 2). A concurrent NDVI decrease and meteorological drought are observed in 2015 in southern Africa and in 2018 in the southwest United States, central Australia, and north of the

How does SMAP SM behave under vegetation changes?

The CCI and GLDAS datasets show the underestimation of SMAP SM over both NDVI-increasing and decreasing areas (Fig. 4). For NDVI-increasing areas, vegetation effects are insufficiently corrected, and it is not difficult to determine the SMAP SM underestimation from radiative transfer (RT) equations. The part of radiation that should originate from vegetation is imposed to soil, causing drier SM retrievals. An NDVI decrease indicates an overcorrection of vegetation effects. The part of radiation

Conclusions

This study quantified the effects of vegetation biases on SMAP SCA-V SM (2015–2018) over global vegetation-disturbed areas determined by negative NDVI anomaly values relative to the 2000–2010 NDVI climatology. Supported by the ESA CCI, GLDAS, SMOS-L3 and SMOS-IC SM datasets, an NDVI decrease (LST increase) of 10% (1 K) might correspond to an underestimation of SMAP SM of ~0.007 (~0.008) m3·m−3. The results conflict with radiative transfer calculations, primarily as a result of the

Credit Author Statement

Xingwang Fan conceived and designed the study, supervised by Yuanbo Liu. Xingwang Fan carried out all data processing with support from Guojing Gan and Guiping Wu. Xingwang Fan draft the manuscript.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No. 41701414 and the State Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No. 41430855. We appreciate the supporting teams and providers of the ESA CCI, GLDAS, SMOS-L3, SMOS-IC and SMAP soil moisture datasets. The authors would like to thank the three reviewers and the associated editor Wigneron, J.-P. for their constructive comments.

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