Surface soil moisture (SM) plays an essential role in the water and energy balance between the land surface and the atmosphere. Low spatio-temporal resolution, about 25–40 km and 2–3 days, of the commonly used global microwave SM products limits their application at regional scales. In this study, we developed an algorithm to improve the SM spatio-temporal resolution using multi-source remote sensing data and a machine-learning model named the General Regression Neural Network (GRNN). First, six high spatial resolution input variables, including Land Surface Temperature (LST), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), albedo, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), Longitude (Lon) and Latitude (Lat), were selected and gap-filled to obtain high spatio-temporal resolution inputs. Then, the GRNN was trained at a low spatio-temporal resolution to obtain the relationship between SM and input variables. Finally, the trained GRNN was driven by the high spatio-temporal resolution input variables to obtain high spatio-temporal resolution SM. We used the Fengyun-3B (FY-3B) SM over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) to test the algorithm. The results show that the algorithm could successfully improve the spatio-temporal resolution of FY-3B SM from 0.25° and 2–3 days to 0.05° and 1-day over the TP. The improved SM is consistent with the original product in terms of both spatial distribution and temporal variation. The high spatio-temporal resolution SM allows a better understanding of the diurnal and seasonal variations of SM at the regional scale, consequently enhancing ecological and hydrological applications, especially under climate change.

The precipitation phase (i.e., rain and snow) is important for the global hydrologic cycle and climate system. The objective of this study is to evaluate the precipitation-phase partitioning capabilities of remote sensing and reanalysis modeling methods on the global scale. Specifically, observation data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Automated Data Processing (ADP), from 2000 to 2007, are used to evaluate the rain–snow discrimination accuracy of the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG) and the fifth-generation reanalysis product of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ERA5). The results show that: (1) the ERA5 performs better than the IMERG at distinguishing rainfall and snowfall events, overall. (2) The ERA5 has high accuracy in all continents except for South America, while the IMERG performs well only in Antarctica and North America. (3) Compared with the IMERG, the ERA5 can more effectively capture snowfall events at high latitudes but shows worse performance at mid-low latitude regions. Both the IMERG and ERA5 have lower accuracy for rain–snow partitioning under heavy precipitation. Overall, the results of this study provide references for the application and improvement of global rain–snow partitioning products.

Spatio-temporally continuous and high-quality soil moisture (SM) is very important for assessing changes in the water cycle and climate, especially over the Tibetan Plateau (TP). Data fusion is an important method to improve the quality of SM product. However, limited observation overlaps between different satellite SM products, caused by inherent gaps, make it difficult to fuse them to create a continuous and high-quality product. In this study, a SM spatio-temporal continuity and quality simultaneously improving algorithm is proposed. The first step of the approach is obtaining spatio-temporally continuous reference data, including land surface temperature (LST), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Albedo, and digital elevation model (DEM). The second step is training the general regression neural network (GRNN) model with all available Essential Climate Variables (ECV) and Fengyun (FY) SM. The last step is predicting the spatio-temporally continuous and high-quality SM using the trained GRNN derived by the spatio-temporal continuity reference data. An implementation of the algorithm on the TP showed that, compared with the original ECV and FY SM, both the continuity and quality of the fused SM product were largely improved in terms of coverage (72.5%), correlation (R=0.809), root mean square error (0.081 cm3 cm-3) and bias (0.050 cm3 cm-3). The algorithm showed a good performance in obtaining spatio-temporal variation fusion weights over the TP. This spatio-temporally continuous and high-quality SM of the TP will help advance our understanding of global and regional changes in water cycle and climate.

Soil moisture (SM) measurements from ground stations are often after quality control (QC) in the operational system, but the QC flags may not be reliable in some cases when precipitation events or manual watering happen. This study applies the triple collocation (TC) method to conduct a cross-evaluation of SM data from ERA5 reanalysis estimates, ESA-CCI estimates, and ~2000 ground stations across the China domain. The results show that all datasets can capture the spatial pattern of SM in China. TC-based correlation coefficient (CC) and root mean square error (RMSE) show that the station data have worse performance in western and central China. For most stations, TC-based CC is between 0.6~0.9, and TC-based RMSE is between 0.01~0.06 m³/m³. In addition, TC-based metrics show good agreement with the CC between precipitation and SM, indicating that these metrics can reflect the quality of station data. We further selected typical stations (e.g., CC $\le$ 0.2, RMSE $\ge$ 0.06 m³/m³) to check the quality of the QC procedure. The comparison shows that TC-based metrics can better represent the actual quality for these stations compared to raw QC flags. This study indicates that TC has the potential to detect problematic stations and could be a supplement to traditional QC of station observations.