2020 ESA Annual Meeting (August 3 - 6)

PS 22 Abstract - Comparison of soil moisture measurements from various spatial scales for an agricultural ecosystem

Sungsik Cho1,2, Minseok Kang2, Sung-Won Choi2, Jongho Kim2, Juhan Park2 and Seungwon Sohn2, (1)Interdiciplinary Program in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South), (2)National Center for AgroMeteorology, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South)
Background/Question/Methods

Soil moisture is essential to control the mass and energy exchanges between land and atmosphere and ecohydrological processes in agricultural lands. In-situ measurements of soil moisture from a limited number of probe-type sensors could be lack of spatial representativeness due to its spatial heterogeneity. Over the past years, development in remote sensing technology from satellite using microwave has provided many opportunities for estimating soil moisture over a large area. To validate such remotely-sensed products using the in-situ measurements, it is required to develop a scaling technique. In this study, we introduce some results from the soil moisture testbed in an agricultural ecosystem, South Korea for developing such scaling technique, which consists of probe-type soil moisture measurements (time-domain reflectometry, TDR) and near-surface remote sensing from cosmic-ray neutron sensor (CRNS).

Results/Conclusions

The CRNS captured the soil moisture dynamics of the testbed well. A liner relationships between the averaged value from the TDR probes and the CRNS measurement with a root-mean-square error of 2.5%, indicating that the CRNS is a promising approach to bridge the gap for validating satellite-based products. In this presentation, we will evaluate the efficacy of CRNS in bridging the scale gaps based on the comparison of soil moisture from the CRNS with the various measurements and estimations (e.g., soil moisture from the soil cores and TDR, soil moisture indices from the various spectroradiometers in space).

Acknowledgments

This study was carried out with the support of “Cooperative Research Program for Agriculture Science and Technology Development (Project No. PJ014892022020)” Rural Development Administration, Republic of Korea and Development Program on See-At Technology for Meteorology and Earth quake of the Korea Meteorological Administration under Grant KMI2018-05810.