ABSTRACT:

We provide the pathways and parameters of surface soil moisture (SM) drydown using global observations from NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) at 36 KM spatial resolution. Globally dominant canonical shapes of SM drydowns are identified using a non-parametric approach. A pixel-wise fitting of the selected canonical forms using a non-linear least-squares approach provide the pathways and parameters of SM drydown. The data generated from this study can be used for diverse applications including (and not limited to) identification of dominant soil hydrologic regimes, understanding land-surface coupling strength, and estimating effective soil water retention parameters at remote-sensing footprint scale etc.
Details can be found in our paper: Sehgal, V., Gaur, N., & Mohanty, B. P. (2020). Global Surface Soil Moisture Drydown Patterns. Water Resources Research, 56, e2020WR027588. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR027588