Multi-Source Soil Moisture Data Fusion Based on Spherical Cap Harmonic Analysis and Helmert Variance Component Estimation in the Western U.S.

Soil moisture (SM) is a vital climate variable in the interaction process between the Earth’s atmosphere and land. However, global soil moisture products from various satellite missions and land surface models are affected by inherently discontinuous observations and coarse spatial resolution, which limits their application at fine spatial scales. To address this problem, this paper integrates three diverse types of datasets from in situ, satellites, and models through Spherical cap harmonic analysis (SCHA) and Helmert variance component estimation (HVCE) to produce 1 km of spatio-temporally continuous SM products with high accuracy. First, this paper eliminates the bias between different datasets and in situ sites and resamples the datasets before data fusion. Then, multi-source SM data fusion is performed based on the SCHA and HVCE methods. Finally, this paper evaluates the fused products from three aspects, including the performance of representative sites under different climate types, the overall performance of validation sites, and the comparison with other products. The results show that the fused products have better performance than other SM products. In the representative sites, the minimal correlation coefficient (R) of the fused products is above 0.85, and the largest root mean square error (RMSE) is below 0.040 m(3) m(−3). For all validation sites, the R and RMSE of the fused products are 0.889 and 0.036 m(3) m(−3), respectively, while the R for other products is below 0.75 and the RMSE is above 0.06 m(3) m(−3). In comparison to other SM products, the fused products exhibit superior performance, generally align more closely with in situ measurements, and possess the ability to accurately and finely capture the spatial and temporal variability of surface SM.