Comparison of different downscaling methods of soil moisture in Luan he Watershed

Passive microwave remote sensing has demonstrated the potential for capturing the high temporal variability of the near-surface soil moisture, however the use of these data is limited by the poor spatial resolution. We compared two different downscaling methods using soil evaporative efficiency derived from Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to disaggregate AMSR-2 soil moisture product. Both methods used information from MODIS to obtain the distributed soil moisture map at regional scales and the results showed reasonable agreement with ground-based soil moisture observations. For Merlin downscaling results, the correlation coefficient and RMSE with ground measured data are 0.74 and 3.21%, and for UCLA downscaling results, the correlation coefficient and RMSE with ground measured data are 0.76 and 3.81%, respectively.