Soil Moisture Content Estimation From Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

Because of its significant absorption power, especially in the shortwave infrared optical region, water dominates the optical reflectance properties of water-bearing materials. This allows us to study a material’s water-related features, such as its moisture content, from optical reflectance. In this study, we proposed a framework to estimate soil moisture content from PRISMA hyperspectral remote sensing data. The proposed framework requires a dry endmember spectrum and an endmember spectrum of high soil moisture along with ground truth moisture content, obtained from ground measurements. The method takes into account the complex interaction of light with soils, the large variation of environmental conditions, leading to spectral variability and the soil-specific behavior of water. The framework is extensively validated using ground-measured soil moisture data from the International Soil Moisture Network database. A total of 1418 PRISMA images corresponding to 151 ground stations were analyzed. From 518 retained images, a total root-mean-squared error of 8.682 % and R2 of 0.385 was obtained.