Land surface temperature (LST) plays a major role in the study of surface energy balances. Remote sensing techniques provide ways to monitor LST at large scales. However, due to atmospheric influences, significant missing data exist in LST products retrieved from satellite thermal infrared (TIR) remotely sensed data. Although passive microwaves (PMWs) are able to overcome these atmospheric influences while estimating LST, the data are constrained by low spatial resolution. In this study, to obtain complete and high-quality LST data, the Bayesian Maximum Entropy (BME) method was introduced to merge 0.01° and 0.25° LSTs inversed from MODIS and AMSR-E data, respectively. The result showed that the missing LSTs in cloudy pixels were filled completely, and the availability of merged LSTs reaches 100%. Because the depths of LST and soil temperature measurements are different, before validating the merged LST, the station measurements were calibrated with an empirical equation between MODIS LST and 0~5 cm soil temperatures. The results showed that the accuracy of merged LSTs increased with the increasing quantity of utilized data, and as the availability of utilized data increased from 25.2% to 91.4%, the RMSEs of the merged data decreased from 4.53 °C to 2.31 °C. In addition, compared with the filling gap method in which MODIS LST gaps were filled with AMSR-E LST directly, the merged LSTs from the BME method showed better spatial continuity. The different penetration depths of TIR and PMWs may influence fusion performance and still require further studies.

Time series of soil moisture (SM) data in the Qinghai–Tibet plateau (QTP) covering a period longer than one decade are important for understanding the dynamics of land surface–atmosphere feedbacks in the global climate system. However, most existing SM products have a relatively short time series or show low performance over the challenging terrain of the QTP. In order to improve the spaceborne monitoring in this area, this study presents a random forest (RF) method to rebuild a high-accuracy SM product over the QTP from 19 June 2002 to 31 March 2015 by adopting the advanced microwave scanning radiometer for earth observing system (AMSR-E), and the advanced microwave scanning radiometer 2 (AMSR2), and tracking brightness temperatures with latitude and longitude using the International Geosphere–Biospheres Programme (IGBP) classification data, the digital elevation model (DEM) and the day of the year (DOY) as spatial predictors. Brightness temperature products (from frequencies 10.7 GHz, 18.7 GHz and 36.5 GHz) of AMSR2 were used to train the random forest model on two years of Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) SM data. The simulated SM values were compared with third year SMAP data and in situ stations. The results show that the RF model has high reliability as compared to SMAP, with a high correlation (R = 0.95) and low values of root mean square error (RMSE = 0.03 m³/m³) and mean absolute percent error (MAPE = 19%). Moreover, the random forest soil moisture (RFSM) results agree well with the data from five in situ networks, with mean values of R = 0.75, RMSE = 0.06 m³/m³, and bias = −0.03 m³/m³ over the whole year and R = 0.70, RMSE = 0.07 m³/m³, and bias = −0.05 m³/m³ during the unfrozen seasons. In order to test its performance throughout the whole region of QTP, the three-cornered hat (TCH) method based on removing common signals from observations and then calculating the uncertainties is applied. The results indicate that RFSM has the smallest relative error in 56% of the region, and it performs best relative to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), and European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) project. The spatial distribution shows that RFSM has a similar spatial trend as GLDAS and ESA CCI, but RFSM exhibits a more distinct spatial distribution and responds to precipitation more effectively than GLDAS and ESA CCI. Moreover, a trend analysis shows that the temporal variation of RFSM agrees well with precipitation and LST (land surface temperature), with a dry trend in most regions of QTP and a wet trend in few north, southeast and southwest regions of QTP. In conclusion, a spatiotemporally continuous SM product with a high accuracy over the QTP was obtained.

High-quality and long time-series soil moisture (SM) data are increasingly required for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP) to more accurately and effectively assess climate change. In this study, to evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of SM data, five passive microwave remotely sensed SM products are collected over the QTP, including those from the soil moisture active passive (SMAP), soil moisture and ocean salinity INRA-CESBIO (SMOS-IC), Fengyun-3B microwave radiation image (FY3B), and two SM products derived from the advanced microwave scanning radiometer 2 (AMSR2). The two AMSR2 products are generated by the land parameter retrieval model (LPRM) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) algorithm, respectively. The SM products are evaluated through a two-stage data comparison method. The first stage is direct validation at the grid scale. Five SM products are compared with corresponding in situ measurements at five in situ networks, including Heihe, Naqu, Pali, Maqu, and Ngari. Another stage is indirect validation at the regional scale, where the uncertainties of the data are quantified by using a three-cornered hat (TCH) method. The results at the regional scale indicate that soil moisture is underestimated by JAXA and overestimated by LPRM, some noise is contained in temporal variations in SMOS-IC, and FY3B has relatively low absolute accuracy. The uncertainty of SMAP is the lowest among the five products over the entire QTP. In the SM map composed by five SM products with the lowest pixel-level uncertainty, 66.64% of the area is covered by SMAP (JAXA: 19.39%, FY3B: 10.83%, LPRM: 2.11%, and SMOS-IC: 1.03%). This study reveals some of the reasons for the different performances of these five SM products, mainly from the perspective of the parameterization schemes of their corresponding retrieval algorithms. Specifically, the parameterization configurations and corresponding input datasets, including the land-surface temperature, the vegetation optical depth, and the soil dielectric mixing model are analyzed and discussed. This study provides quantitative evidence to better understand the uncertainties of SM products and explain errors that originate from the retrieval algorithms.

Here, four normalized difference water index (NDWI) variants, i.e., NDWI _(860,970) , NDWI _(860,1240) , NDWI _(860,1640) , and NDWI _(1240,1640) are generated from the corn-oriented PROSAIL radiative transfer model. It is found that, instead of the linear relationship derived in previous studies, corn canopy water content (CWC) is best approximated as an exponential function of NDWI. Following the analysis of the PROSAIL-generated results, a newly optimized NDWI-based scheme is proposed for estimating corn CWC according to variations in the performance of the four NDWI variants under different CWC conditions. Validation results based on independent field data from the SMEX02, HiWATER2012, and Baoding2018 field experiments verify that this optimized NDWI-based corn CWC estimating scheme has a higher accuracy ( $R = 0.87\,\,\pm \,\,0.03$ , RMSE = 0.2068 ± 0.0145 kg/m ² ) than existing NDWI-based strategies for corn CWC retrieval. The feasibility of retrieving corn vegetation water content (VWC) based on the optimized NDWI-based scheme is also investigated, and the superiority of the optimized NDWI-based scheme for retrieving corn VWC is assessed. By comparing with four other NDWI-based corn VWC estimating methods, as well as the corn VWC parameterization scheme applied in the SMAP soil moisture algorithm, it is shown that our optimized NDWI-based scheme has the best VWC estimation accuracy, with the highest $R$ of 0.89 ± 0.02 and the lowest RMSE of 0.7179 ± 0.0555 kg/m ² .