Reconstruction of a Global 9 km, 8-Day SMAP Surface Soil Moisture Dataset during 2015–2020 by Spatiotemporal Fusion

Abstract

Soil moisture, a crucial property for Earth surface research, has been focused widely in various studies. The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) global products at 36 km and 9 km (called P36 and AP9 in this research) have been published from April 2015. However, the 9 km AP9 product was retrieved from the active radar and L-band passive radiometer and the active radar failed in July 2015. In this research, the virtual image pair-based spatiotemporal fusion model was coupled with a spatial weighting scheme (VIPSTF-SW) to simulate the 9 km AP9 data after failure of the active radar. The method makes full use of all the historical AP9 and P36 data available between April and July 2015. As a result, 8-day composited 9 km SMAP data at the global scale were produced from 2015 to 2020, by downscaling the corresponding 8-day composited P36 data. The available AP9 data and in situ reference data were used to validate the predicted 9 km data. Generally, the predicted 9 km SMAP data can provide more spatial details than P36 and are more accurate than the existing EP9 product. The VIPSTF-SW-predicted 9 km SMAP data are an accurate substitute for AP9 and will be made freely available to support research and applications in hydrology, climatology, ecology, and many other fields at the global scale.