GIScience & Remote Sensing

Soil moisture is widely recognized as an essential parameter to link the terrestrial water, energy, and carbon cycles in Earth ecosystems. Over the past several decades, great progress has been made in developing soil moisture datasets, using remote sensing technologies (e.g., active and passive microwave) and data assimilation by Land Surface Model (LSM). On the remote sensing side, a few spaceborne satellites/sensors have been successfully launched, including the passive microwave instruments, such as SMOS, SMAP, AMSR-E/2, FY-3 MWRI, and active microwave instruments, such as ASCAT, Sentinel-1, and Gaofen-3, to provide valuable opportunities to obtain soil moisture data at various spatial and temporal scales. With LSM, plenty of reanalysis or model-based soil moisture products at various soil depths (e.g., from topsoil to root zone) have been released, e.g., GLDAS-Noah, ERA5, MERRA-2, and CLDAS. These techniques and datasets stimulate a wide range of possibilities to understand spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture and help reveal the land-atmosphere interactions in Earth ecosystems. In this context, this Article Collection aims to present the most advanced theories, models, algorithms, products, and hydro-ecological applications associated with soil moisture.

The topics of the Article Collection include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Review on remote sensing (microwave, optical, thermal, etc.) and reanalysis of soil moisture
• Introduction to field or aircraft experiments, as well as new technologies for ground soil moisture measurements
• Evaluation or comparison of satellite-based and model-based soil moisture products using in situ measurements, or other mathematical approaches (e.g., TCA, TCH, IVd)
• Development, calibration/validation of the theoretical or semi-empirical forward models used for satellite soil moisture retrieval
• Development of vegetation optical depth (VOD, related to canopy water content and dry mass) and its interactions with soil moisture
• Enhancements of soil moisture products (e.g., spatial downscaling, data fusion, and gap filling combining with multi-source datasets)
• The hydro-ecological applications of soil moisture (e.g., carbon, drought, flood, wild-fire monitoring）

Guest Advisor biography:

Peng Fu is a professor and a lead research scientist with the Center for Environment, Energy, and Economy at Harrisburg University (HU). Before working at HU, he was a research scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA, where he was financially supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to conduct research related to photosynthesis for improved crop production in the U.S. Midwest and worldwide. His research interests cover a wide range of remote sensing and geospatial applications in environment, plant physiology, natural resources, and urbanization. Dr. Fu has also served as an editorial board member for GIScience and Remote Sensing, Remote Sensing of Environment, and a few others.

Hongliang Ma received the B.S. degree in GIS from Huazhong Agriculture University in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree in cartography and geographic information engineering in LIESMARS, Wuhan University in 2022, respectively. He is currently working as Post-Doc in INRAE, France. His study interests include remote sensing (both microwave and optical) of soil moisture and vegetation water/biomass, and hydro-ecological applications. Dr. Ma served as the guest editor for Remote Sensing special issues on “Microwave Remote Sensing of Soil Moisture” and “Spatial or Temporal Analysis of Soil Moisture from Space”, respectively.

Jiangyuan Zeng is an Associate Professor with the State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China. His research interests include microwave remote sensing of geophysical parameters (particularly soil moisture), and hydrological applications of satellite remote sensing. Dr. Zeng has been a member of the Editorial Board of Remote Sensing of Environment since 2020, and an Associate Editor of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing since 2021. He served as an Executive Guest Editor for the Remote Sensing of Environment Special Issue on “Emerging remote sensing techniques for hydrological applications”. He is an excellent member of the Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS.

Jean-Pierre Wigneron is a senior research scientist at the Institut National de Recherche Agronomiques (INRA) and Head of the INRA/ISPA remote sensing team. His research interests are in passive and active microwave remote sensing of soil and vegetation. He has developed 2-Parameter (Soil Moisture and Vegetation Optical Depth) retrieval methods at the basis of the inversion approach proposed for the ESA/SMOS mission (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) and coordinated the development of the L-MEB model (L-band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere), the forward model of the SMOS operational algorithm, and the SMOS-IC, SMAP-IB and ASCAT-IB products. Prof. Wigneron is a Fellow of IEEE and served as the Associate Editor of Remote Sensing of Environment.

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article