Assessing the Potential of Satellite-Retrieved and Global Land Data
Assimilation System-Simulated Soil Moisture Datasets for Soil Moisture
Mapping in Bangladesh
Abstract
Soil moisture plays an essential role in the complex eco-hydrologic
processes, such as infiltration, rainfall-evapotranspiration-runoff
circulation, photosynthesis, and groundwater recharge. However, the
accurate estimation of soil moisture (SM) at regional or larger scale is
difficult because SM varies highly over space and time due to
heterogeneous land cover and soil properties, and ground measurements
are often time-consuming and expensive. Currently, Bangladesh
Meteorological Department (BMD) measures SM only at twelve stations
which is quite inadequate for assessing large-scale spatial and temporal
variation of SM. Thus, satellite-derived soil moisture data products or
Global Land Data Assimilation System simulated (GLDAS-2.2) soil moisture
dataset with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Data
Assimilation (GRACE-DA) can be promising alternatives to the in-situ
measurement for this data-scarce region. In this study, the spatial and
temporal variations of SM from GLDAS and Soil Moisture Active Passive
(SMAP) satellite were compared against the in-situ measurements from
seven agrometeorological stations of Bangladesh. The GLDAS and SMAP
products overpredicted the in-situ SM for most of the stations and could
capture the temporal dynamics of observed SM with correlation
coefficient (R) of 0.36 and 0.17, respectively. Later an Artificial
Neural Network model was developed based on soil moisture from both
sources (SMAP and GLDAS) and terrestrial water storage from GLDAS to
obtain more accurate estimation of SM for this data-scarce region. The
ANN model shows an improvement in estimation and predicted SM with R =
0.63 (considering all stations). The results were more promising when
separate model is developed for each study site. Incorporating
additional climate data (such as precipitation with different lag times)
as input improved the accuracy marginally. This study suggests that the
release of daily GRACE gravity field solutions in near-real-time may
provide a reasonable and continuous estimate of soil moisture in this
data-scarce region.