Print Email Facebook Twitter Impact of soil moisture data resolution on soil moisture and surface heat flux estimates through data assimilation Title Impact of soil moisture data resolution on soil moisture and surface heat flux estimates through data assimilation: A case study in the Southern Great Plains Author Lu, Y. (TU Delft Water Resources) Dong, Jianzhi (USDA-ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory) Steele-Dunne, S.C. (TU Delft Water Resources) Date 2019 Abstract The spatial heterogeneity and temporal variation of soil moisture and surface heat fluxes are key to many geophysical and environmental studies. It has been demonstrated that they can be mapped by assimilating soil thermal and wetness information into surface energy balance models. The aim of this work is to determine whether enhancing the spatial resolution or temporal sampling frequency of soil moisture data could improve soil moisture or surface heat flux estimates. Two experiments are conducted in an area mainly covered by grassland, and land surface temperature (LST) observations from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) mission are assimilated together with either an enhanced L-band passive soil moisture product (9 km, 2-3 days) from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission or a merged product (36 km, quasi-daily) from the SMAP and the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. The results suggest that the availability of soil moisture observations is increased by 41% after merging data from the SMAP and the SMOS missions. A comparison with results from a previous study that assimilated a coarser SMAP soil moisture product (36 km, 2-3 days) suggests that enhancing the temporal sampling frequency of soil moisture observations leads to improved soil moisture estimates at both the surface and root zone, and the largest improvement is seen in the bias metric (0.008 and 0.007m 3 m -3 on average at the surface and root zone, respectively). Enhancing the spatial resolution, however, does not significantly improve soil moisture estimates, particularly at the surface. Surface heat flux estimates from assimilating soil moisture data of different spatial or temporal resolutions are very similar. Subject Atmosphere-land interactionData assimilationEnergy budget/balanceRemote sensingSoil moistureSurface temperature To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ae86c8b5-1ead-4f2e-a498-aadfee340022 DOI https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-18-0234.1 Embargo date 2019-10-25 ISSN 1525-755X Source Journal of Hydrometeorology, 20 (4), 715-730 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2019 Y. Lu, Jianzhi Dong, S.C. Steele-Dunne Files PDF Lu2019_JHM.pdf 2.76 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:ae86c8b5-1ead-4f2e-a498-aadfee340022/datastream/OBJ/view