Title:
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Soil moisture estimation using satellite remote sensing and numerical weather prediction model for hydrological applications
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Soil moisture is an important variable in hydrological modelling used for real time flood
forecasting and water resources management. However, it is a very challenging task to
measure soil moisture over a hydrological catchment using conventional in-situ sensors.
Remote sensing is gaining popularity due to its large coverage suitable for soil moisture
measurement at a catchment scale albeit there are still many knowledge gaps to be filled
in. This thesis focuses on investigating soil moisture estimation from remote sensing
satellite and land surface model (LSM) coupled with a Numerical Weather Prediction
(NWP) model. A hydrological-based approach has been conducted to assess/evaluate the
estimated soil moisture using event-based water balance and Probability Distributed
Model (PDM). An Advance Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) and a physically-
based Land Parameters Retrieval Model (LPRM) have been used to retrieve surface soil
moisture over the sturdy area. The LPRM vegetation and roughness parameters have been
empirically calibrated by a new approach proposed in this thesis. The relevant parameters
are calibrated on the hydrological model through achieving the best correlation between
the observation-based catchment storage and the retrieved surface soil moisture. The
development of the land surface model coupled with the NWP model is used to estimate
soil moisture at different combinations of soil layers. The optimal combination of the top
two layers is found to have the best performance when compared to the catchment water
storage. Regression-based mathematical models have been derived to predict the
catchment storage from the estimated soil moisture based on both satellite remote sensing
and the LSM-NWP model. Three schemes are proposed to examine the behaviour of soil
moisture products over different seasons in order to find the appropriate formulas in
different scenarios. Finally, weighted coefficients and arithmetic average data fusion
methods are explored to integrate two independent soil moisture products from the
AMSR-E satellite and the LSM-NWP. It has been found that the merged output is a
significant improvement over their individual estimates. The implementation of the fusion
technique has provided a new opportunity for information integration from satellite and
NWP model.
Keywords: Soil moisture, Satellite remote sensing, satellite, land surface model, NWP
model, rainfall-runoff model, water balance, PDM model
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