IN036-03
Near Real Time One-kilometer SMOPS Soil Moisture and Its Potential Applications

Tuesday, 15 December 2020: 05:38
Virtual
Jifu Yin, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States, Xiwu Zhan, NOAA/NESDIS/STAR, College Park, MD, United States, Ralph R Ferraro, NOAA/NESDIS, College Park, MD, United States, Jicheng Liu, Laboratory of Environmental Model & Data Optima, Laurel, MD, United States, Nai-Yu Wang, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States, Hamid Moradkhani, The University of Alabama, Center for Complex Hydrosystems Research, Tuscaloosa, AL, United States and Jeffrey P Walker, Monash University, Department of Civil Engineering, Clayton, VIC, Australia
Recorded Presentation
Abstract:
Soil moisture (SM) plays a vital role for the understanding of land surface hydrological, meteorological and climatological processes. To meet the need of real time global SM data sets of NOAA operations, a Soil Moisture Operational Product System (SMOPS) has been developed at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to provide a one stop shop for SM observations from all available satellite sensors. What makes the SMOPS unique is its near real time global blended SM product. Since the first version SMOPS publicly released in 2012, the SMOPS has been updated twice based on the users’ feedbacks through improving retrieval algorithms and new satellite observations.

Because of the current limitation of satellite antenna technology, however, the footprint sizes of microwave satellite soil moisture are all tens of kilometers. To overcome the coarse spatial scale limitation of relatively accurate microwave radiometer soil moisture data, several downscaling algorithms have been proposed in recent literature. Building on Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) land surface temperature (LST) and enhanced vegetation index (EVI), an optimal downscaling strategy was selected from those widely used downscaling schemes to generate a 0.01˚ SMOPS soil moisture dataset from 2017 in this study.

According to the US Drought Monitor (USDM), the dry conditions were unusually widespread across the Mid-west U.S. during June 2018 and particularly serious in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada and South California. The developed 0.01˚ SMOPS reasonably exhibits the drought episodes. Hurricane Harvey was a devastating Category 4 hurricane that made landfall on Texas on 26 August 2017, and triggered flooding in the Houston metropolitan area and Southeast Texas until 5 September 2017. The downscaled 0.01˚ SMOPS SM product provides a reasonable representation of the flooding record on 2 September 2017and presents much more spatial detail, which may highlight the advantages of the fine-scale SMOPS soil moisture product. The developed 0.01˚ SMOPS product is expected to benefit the hydrological, meteorological and climatological researches as well as numerical weather, climate and water prediction operations.

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