Using Generalized Regression Neural Network to Retrieve Bare Surface Soil Moisture From Radarsat-2 Backscatter Observations, Regardless of Roughness Effect

Abstract

The combined influence of surface soil moisture and roughness on radar backscatters has been limiting SAR’s application in soil moisture retrieval. In the past research, multi-temporal analysis and artificial neural network (ANN) inversion of physically based forward models were regarded as promising methods to decouple that combined influence. However, the former does not consider soil roughness change over a relatively longer period and the latter makes it hard to thoroughly eliminate the effect of soil roughness. This study proposes to use generalized regression neural network (GRNN) to derive bare surface soil moisture (BSSM) from radar backscatter observations regardless of the effect of soil roughness (GRNN inversion of backscatter observations). This method not only can derive BSSM from radar backscatters, provided soil roughness is unknown in any long period, but also can train models based on small-size sample data so as to reduce the manual error of training data created by simulation of physically based models. The comparison of validations between BSSM-backscatter models and BSSM-roughness-backscatter models both analyzed by GRNN shows that the incorporation of soil roughness cannot raise the prediction accuracy of models and, instead, even reduce it, indicating that the combined influence is thoroughly decoupled when being analyzed by GRNN. Moreover, BSSM-backscatter models by GRNN are recommended due to their good prediction, even compared to those related models in past publications.