Development of Temperature/ Vegetation Indexes for Estimating Soil Moisture Content Using Co- Moisture Lines Extracted from a One- Year Temperature/ Vegetation Scatter Plot of MODIS Data

Soil moisture plays an important role in interactive processes between earth and atmosphere and global climate changes. In recent decades, there has been a great research interest to determine soil moisture from remote sensing methods. Triangular or trapezoidal methods are the most common remote sensing methods that apply the combination of thermal and optical satellite images to estimate soil moisture content. The accuracy of methods governed by the accuracy of saturated and dry edges that define from vegetation/ temperature scatter plot. A main limitation of these methods arose in some days or in some vegetation condition that dry and wet edges cannot be defined correctly. This concern is addressed in this paper by using the temperature and vegetation information during one year interval to form the temperature-vegetation scatter plot, saturated edge and dry edge exactly. The main contribution of the paper is, however, the introduction of co­-moisture lines in the one-year scatter plot. These lines are later applied to define the wet and dry edges of each individual day which are taken as the two closest co-moisture lines that contain all corresponding pixels of that day. The soil moisture index as a parameter dependent to evaporation efficiency is finally estimated from the slope and intercept of these two co-moisture lines. The proposed soil moisture index calculated from co-moisture was implemented and validated in Manitoba, Canada area while MODIS satellite images, taken in 28 cloudless days of year 2014, were used as the input data. The correlation between ground soil moisture data and proposed soil moisture index was estimated. Correlation of 0.92 was achieved for low vegetation days and lower in days with higher vegetation densities.