Downscaled microwave soil moisture (SM) products with a fine resolution are of great importance for both local and regional studies. However, few studies have explored the merits of multiple downscaled microwave SM products. An evaluation of the different products could help to advance knowledge of the downscaled microwave SM products and help researchers to choose the appropriate downscaled SM products for use in further studies. In this research, five microwave SM products derived from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer–Earth Observing System (AMSR-E), AMSR2, and Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) data were downscaled via the back-propagation neural network (BPNN). The BPNN was chosen because it can effectively simulate the nonlinear relationship between SM and the land surface temperature (LST)/vegetation index (VI). The different downscaled SM products were evaluated with in-situ SM data from the central Tibetan Plateau Soil Moisture/Temperature Monitoring Network (SMTMN) during the period from 1 August 2010 to 31 December 2012. Compared with the regression technique, the downscaled correlation coefficient (r) is significantly improved by the BPNN. The downscaled root-mean-square error (RMSE) and bias are comparable for the two techniques. As expected, LST and enhanced VI (EVI) are physically related to SM, and this is the most suitable combination for SM downscaling. Except for the ascending node of SMOS and AMSR2, the downscaled r is closely related to the original RMSE, and a lower original RMSE for the SM product results in a higher downscaled r. The BPNN-downscaled SMOS product in descending node is the closest to the in-situ SM among the different downscaled microwave SM products. The temporal variations and ranges of the microwave SM products are well maintained by the BPNN downscaling. Furthermore, the evaluations against in-situ SM reveal that the overall accuracies of the BPNN-downscaled SM products are very close to the original microwave SM products.

Soil moisture is a key component of the water cycle budget. Sensing soil moisture using microwave sensors onboard satellites is an effective way to retrieve surface soil moisture (SSM) at a global scale, but the retrieval accuracy in some regions is inadequate due to the complicated factors influencing the general retrieval process. On the other hand, monitoring soil moisture directly through in-situ devices is capable of providing high-accuracy SSM measurements, but the distribution of such stations is sparse. Recently, the Global Navigation Satellite System interferometric Reflectometry (GNSS-R) method was used to derive field-scale SSM, which can serve as a supplement to contemporary sparse in-situ soil moisture networks. On this basis, it is of great research significance to explore the fusion of these different kinds of SSM data, so as to improve the present satellite SSM products with regard to their data accuracy. In this paper, a multi-source point-surface fusion method based on the generalized regression neural network (GRNN) model is applied to fuse the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) Level 3 radiometer SSM daily product with in-situ measured and GNSS-R estimated SSM data from five soil moisture networks in the western continental U.S. The results show that the GRNN model obtains a fairly good performance, with a cross-validation R value of approximately 0.9 and a ubRMSE of 0.044 cm³ cm⁻³. Furthermore, the fused SSM product agrees well with the site-specific SSM data in terms of time and space, which demonstrates that the proposed GRNN model is able to construct the non-linear relationship between the point- and surface-scale SSM.