SMAP Soil Moisture Change as an Indicator of Drought Conditions
Name
remotesensing-10-00788-v2.pdf
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5.52 MB
Format
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Eswar, Rajasekaran
Das, Narendra N.
Poulsen, Calvin
Behrangi, Ali
Swigart, John
Svoboda, Mark
Yueh, Simon
Doorn, Bradley
Entin, Jared
Rajasekaran, Eswar
Date Issued
May 2018
Journal
Remote Sensing
Publisher
MDPI AG
Citation
Rajasekaran, Eswar et al. "SMAP Soil Moisture Change as an Indicator of Drought Conditions." Remote Sensing 10, 5 (May 2018): 788 © 2018 The Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Soil moisture is considered a key variable in drought analysis. The soil moisture dynamics given by the change in soil moisture between two time periods can provide information on the intensification or improvement of drought conditions. The aim of this work is to analyze how the soil moisture dynamics respond to changes in drought conditions over multiple time intervals. The change in soil moisture estimated from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite observations was compared with the United States Drought Monitor (USDM) and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) over the contiguous United States (CONUS). The results indicated that the soil moisture change over 13-week and 26-week intervals is able to capture the changes in drought intensity levels in the USDM, and the change over a four-week interval correlated well with the one-month SPI values. This suggested that a short-term negative soil moisture change may indicate a lack of precipitation, whereas a persistent long-term negative soil moisture change may indicate severe drought conditions. The results further indicate that the inclusion of soil moisture change will add more value to the existing drought-monitoring products. Keywords: soil moisture; SMAP; drought; United States Drought Monitor; SPI
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10050788
