Research on the method for retrieving soil moisture using thermal inertia model

摘要

In order to improve accuracy of soil moisture inversion using remote sensing, a new thermal inertia model is proposed in this paper. The improved model needs only surface maximum temperature as the temperature parameter input instead of input of the surface temperature difference, as well as the surface sensible and latent fluxes are introduced into boundary conditions of thermal conductivity equation. Furthermore, surface soil conductive heat transfer equation of two-layer model is used to solve the soil thermal inertia so that the remote sensing thermal inertia method can be applied to regions with better-covered vegetation, but usually only for the bare areas or worse vegetation covered areas. The model has been tested at several locations in the area of west Inner Mongolia. Comparing the simulation of the new model with the measurements obtained by apparent thermal inertia and by field test, the result shows that the inertia thermal model can be used to estimate soil moisture in more reasonable accuracy.