Downscaling of Soil Moisture Retrieved from Multi-sensor Remote Sensing Data over the Zhanghe Irrigation Area, China

EXTENDED ABSTRACT Soil moisture plays a vital role in the atmosphere-land interactions, hydrological simulation, weather numerical prediction and agricultural arid monitoring. It may control the partition of water and energy into sensible heat flux, latent heat flux, evapotranspiration, runoff and baseflow between land and atmosphere respectively. In order to obtain the profile of soil moisture, point measurement often was carried out in many large field-experiments, but data observed from single station could not meet the spatial distributed requirements in many applications because of the spatial heterogeneity of soil moisture. Fortunately, satellite remote sensing provides an effective way to acquire the spatial distributed information of soil moisture in continental or basin scale. In general, a large number of satellite sensors could be used to estimate the spatial distribution of surface soil moisture, including optical, thermal infrared, active microwave and passive microwave sensors at various platforms. Moreover, a large amount of satellite images with different temporal and spatial resolutions also was acquired in recent decades all over the world.