Soil Moisture Estimation Using a SAR Water Cloud Model for an Improved Anchor Pixel Selection Process in SEBAL

摘要: The sensible heat flux component calculation in the Surface Energy Balance Algorithm for Land (SEBAL) completely relies upon the anchor pixel locations. The fragmented agriculture regions with diverse crops make the selection process more challenging with less probability to correlate with ground realities. The conventional methods for anchor pixel selection have limitations in capturing the soil moisture variations beneath the canopy as they utilize only the thermal remote sensing images and ancillary datasets like land-cover and crop-type maps. This study attempts to reduce the gap between the ground realities and simulated results by adding soil moisture as a supplementary parameter. The prospects of the semi-empirical Water Cloud Model (WCM) to estimate the soil moisture content was tested in a fragmented agricultural region for different time periods. The concurrent satellite data obtained from Sentinel …