• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.35 no.5_1
• /
• pp.665-679
• /
• 2019

Mesoscale soil moisture measurement from the promising Cosmic-Ray Neutron Probe (CRNP) is expected to bridge the gap between large scale microwave remote sensing and point-based in-situ soil moisture observations. Traditional calibration based on $N_0$ method is used to convert neutron intensity measured at the CRNP to field scale soil moisture. However, the static calibration parameter $N_0$ used in traditional technique is insufficient to quantify long term soil moisture variation and easily influenced by different time-variant factors, contributing to the high uncertainties in CRNP soil moisture product. Consequently, in this study, we proposed a modified traditional calibration method, so-called Dynamic-$N_0$ method, which take into account the temporal variation of $N_0$ to improve the CRNP based soil moisture estimation. In particular, a nonlinear regression method has been developed to directly estimate the time series of $N_0$ data from the corrected neutron intensity. The $N_0$ time series were then reapplied to generate the soil moisture. We evaluated the performance of Dynamic-$N_0$ method for soil moisture estimation compared with the traditional one by using a weighted in-situ soil moisture product. The results indicated that Dynamic-$N_0$ method outperformed the traditional calibration technique, where correlation coefficient increased from 0.70 to 0.72 and RMSE and bias reduced from 0.036 to 0.026 and -0.006 to $-0.001m^3m^{-3}$. Superior performance of the Dynamic-$N_0$ calibration method revealed that the temporal variability of $N_0$ was caused by hydrogen pools surrounding the CRNP. Although several uncertainty sources contributed to the variation of $N_0$ were not fully identified, this proposed calibration method gave a new insight to improve field scale soil moisture estimation from the CRNP.