An Improved Method for Monitoring of Soil Moisture Using NOAA-AVHRR Data

Soil moisture is a crucial variable in research works of hydrology, meteorology and plant sciences. Adequate soil moisture is essential for plant growth; excesses and deficits of soil moisture must be considered in agricultural practices. There are already several remote sensing methods used for monitoring soil moisture, such as thermal inertia, vegetation water-supplying index, crop water stress index and multi-factor regression. In this paper, an improved method has been discussed which is based on the thermal inertia. We analyzed the problems of monitoring soil moisture using satellites at first, and then put forward an simplified method which directly uses land surface temperature differences to measure soil moisture. Also we have taken the influence of vegetation into account, and import NDVI into the model. The method was used in the study of soil moisture in Heilongjiang Province, China, and we draw the conclusion by the experiments that the model can evidently increase the precision of monitoring soil moisture.