Estimation of Soil Moisture using Downscaling Soil Moisture Method of Microwave Sensor and the SMAR Model (A Case Study: Rafsanjan Plain)

Estimation of soil moisture at various temporal and spatial scales is a key to the strategic management of water resources. Satellite-based microwave observations have coarse spatial resolution despite widespread and continuous of the provision surface soil moisture (SSM). In this study, the SSM data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) 25km resolution were used and these products were downscaled by three parameters retrieved from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to 1km resolution. In the next step, the integration of the SSM downscaling model with SMAR model was used to monitor the root zone soil moisture(RZSM) in the study area (Rafsanjan plain). In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed method, the SSM and the soil profile moisture were measured at 10 points in the Rafsanjan plain. Comparison of AMSR2 25k SSM and downscaled SSM with the field measurement data showed that the mean of total stations for the correlation coefficient(R) was increased from 0.540 to 0.739 and the mean absolute error(MAE) and the root mean square(RMSE) were reduced from 0.039 and 0.040 to 0.018 and 0.020, respectively. Moreover, the results obtained from the validation of the RZSM values showed that the proposed method could estimate the RZSM with high accuracy and indicate the variations.