Long-term SMOS soil moisture products: A comprehensive evaluation across scales and methods in the Duero Basin (Spain)

The European Space Agency’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Level 2 soil moisture and the new L3 product from the Barcelona Expert Center (BEC) were validated from January 2010 to June 2014 using two in situ networks in Spain. The first network is the Soil Moisture Measurement Stations Network of the University of Salamanca (REMEDHUS), which has been extensively used for validating remotely sensed observations of soil moisture. REMEDHUS can be considered a small-scale network that covers a 1300 km² region. The second network is a large-scale network that covers the main part of the Duero Basin (65,000 km²). At an existing meteorological network in the Castilla y Leon region (Inforiego), soil moisture probes were installed in 2012 to provide data until 2014. Comparisons of the temporal series using different strategies (total average, land use, and soil type) as well as using the collocated data at each location were performed. Additionally, spatial correlations on each date were computed for specific days. Finally, an improved version of the Triple Collocation (TC) method, i.e., the Extended Triple Collocation (ETC), was used to compare satellite and in situ soil moisture estimates with outputs of the Soil Water Balance Model Green-Ampt (SWBM-GA). The results of this work showed that SMOS estimates were consistent with in situ measurements in the time series comparisons, with Pearson correlation coefficients (R) and an Agreement Index (AI) higher than 0.8 for the total average and the land-use averages and higher than 0.85 for the soil-texture averages. The results obtained at the Inforiego network showed slightly better results than REMEDHUS, which may be related to the larger scale of the former network. Moreover, the best results were obtained when all networks were jointly considered. In contrast, the spatial matching produced worse results for all the cases studied.These results showed that the recent reprocessing of the L2 products (v5.51) improved the accuracy of soil moisture retrievals such that they are now suitable for developing new L3 products, such as the presented in this work. Additionally, the validation based on comparisons between dense/sparse networks and satellite retrievals at a coarse resolution showed that temporal patterns in the soil moisture are better reproduced than spatial patterns.