Multiple-Depth Soil Moisture Estimates Using Artificial Neural Network and Long Short-Term Memory Models

Abstract

Accurate prediction of soil moisture is important yet challenging in various disciplines, such as agricultural systems, hydrology studies, and ecosystems studies. However, many data-driven models are being used to simulate and predict soil moisture at only a single depth. To predict soil moisture at various soil depths with depths of 100, 200, 500, and 1000 mm from the surface, based on the weather and soil characteristic data, this study designed two data-driven models: artificial neural networks and long short-term memory models. The developed models are applied to predict daily soil moisture up to 6 days ahead at four depths in the Eagle Lake Observatory in California, USA. The overall results showed that the long short-term memory model provides better predictive performance than the artificial neural network model for all depths. The root mean square error of the predicted soil moisture from both models is lower than 2.0, and the correlation coefficient is 0.80–0.97 for the artificial neural network model and 0.90–0.98 for the long short-term memory model. In addition, monthly based evaluation results showed that soil moisture predicted from the data-driven models is highly useful for analyzing the effects on the water cycle during the wet season as well as dry seasons. The prediction results can be used as basic data for numerous fields such as hydrological study, agricultural study, and environment, respectively.