Predicting High-Resolution Soil Moisture Using MODIS Bands: A Fusion-Regression Approach

Abstract

Soil moisture (SM) is a crucial biophysical parameter that plays a significant role in predicting food security. Monitoring SM is essential as it provides valuable insights into agricultural productivity and the impacts of climate change. Remote sensing platforms retrieve SM data from various satellites, enabling global monitoring. However, the coarse resolution of these datasets limits their ability to capture fine-scale variations in SM. To address this challenge, this study aims to generate a high-resolution SM product using data from the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. The SMAP data is fused with MODIS spectral bands to create a multi-source dataset, which is then used as input for different regression models to achieve downscaling of SM. Experimental results demonstrate that the Extremely Randomized Trees (ERT) model achieves the minimum error, with RMSE 0.0113 m3/m3, MAE 0.0172 m3/m3, and R2 0.9725. The study focuses on Karnataka, covering the temporal window from 2015 to 2022. © 2025 IEEE.