Application of Satellite-Derived Surface Soil Moisture Data to Simulating Seasonal Precipitation by a Simple Soil Moisture Transfer Method

Abstract

A simple algorithm is presented for transferring root-zone soil moisture from surface soil moisture data on a global scale. Analysis of offline soil moisture data shows that the climatological relationship between surface and root-zone soil moisture becomes linear when appropriate time lags are applied. The climatological relationship of root-zone soil moisture among different land surface models (LSMs) is also linear; therefore, the root-zone and surface soil moisture obtained from one LSM can be applied to another. The algorithm is then applied to the surface soil moisture observations made by the precipitation radar on board the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission precipitation radar (TRMM/PR), and the transferred root-zone soil moisture is input to a general circulation model (GCM) summer?June, July, August?precipitation simulation as the boundary condition. The approach is computationally efficient, and the simulation using the root-zone soil moisture by the transfer method is much better than a simulation using root-zone soil moisture without the transfer method, assuming that the volumetric percentage of TRMM/PR is representative of the root zone. The result indicates that the simple transfer process will increase the utility of surface soil moisture data for a GCM.