Evaluation of Several Satellite-Based Soil Moisture Products in the Continental US

Abstract

Satellite-based soil moisture products are suitable for large-scale regional monitoring due to the accessibility. Five soil moisture products including SMAP, ESA CCI, and AMSR2 (ascending, descending, and average) were selected in the continental United States (US) from 2016 to 2021. To evaluate the performance of the products and assess their applicability, ISMN (International Soil Moisture Network) data were used as the in situ measurement. PBIAS (Percentage of BIAS), R (Pearson correlation coefficient), RMSE (Root Mean Square Error), ubRMSE (unbiased RMSE), MAE (Mean Absolute Error), and MBE (Mean Bias Error) were selected for evaluation. The performance of five products over six observation networks and various land cover types was compared, and the differences were analyzed at monthly, seasonal, and annual scales. The results show that SMAP had the smallest deviation with the ISMN data because PBIAS was around −0.13, and MBE was around −0.02 m3/m3. ESA CCI performed the best in almost all aspects; its R reached around 0.7, and RMSE was only around 0.07 m3/m3 at the three time scales. The performance of the AMSR2 products varied greatly across the time scales, and increasing errors and deviations showed from 2016 to 2020. The PBO_H2O and USCRN networks could reflect soil moisture characteristics in the continental US, while iRON performed poorly. The evaluation of the networks was closely related to spatial distributions. All products performed better over grasslands and shrublands with R, which was greater than 0.52, and ubRMSE was around 0.1 m3/m3, while products performed worse over forests, where PBIAS was less than −0.62, and RMSE was greater than 0.2 m3/m3, except for ESA CCI. From the boxplot, SMAP was close to the ISMN data with differences less than 0.004 m3/m3 between the median and lower quartiles.