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earth and related environmental sciences

Sentinel 1 Surface Soil Moisture (SSM)

Learn how to compute surface soil moisture from Sentinel-1 data

Authors
Affiliations
Eurac Research
Eurac Research
ESA EOPF Zarr Logo

🚀 Launch in JupyterHub

Run this notebook interactively with all dependencies pre-installed

Introduction

In this notebook, we will demonstrate how to compute surface soil moisture (SSM) from Sentinel-1 data using EOPF Zarr data. Surface soil moisture is a crucial parameter for various applications, including agriculture, hydrology, and climate studies.

The original notebook comes from the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem

Setup

Start importing the necessary libraries

<xarray.core.options.set_options at 0x7f5d6cdebb60>

Configuration

Helper functions

The following helper functions handle the core SAR data preprocessing: spatial slicing to extract our area of interest, sigma-nought calibration to convert digital numbers to backscatter values, and geocoding to transform from radar geometry to geographic coordinates.

Creating a reference period datacube

Found 91 reference images

Preprocess reference period data


Successfully preprocessed 91 images
CPU times: user 2min 5s, sys: 1min 9s, total: 3min 14s
Wall time: 1min 24s

Geocode reference period data

Grid shape: (723, 823)

Geocoded 91 products
CPU times: user 3min, sys: 743 ms, total: 3min
Wall time: 1min 31s
Loading...

Calculate dry and wet references

Search current period data

Process current observations

CPU times: user 3.3 s, sys: 756 ms, total: 4.06 s
Wall time: 5.69 s
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Calculate surface soil moisture

Visualize results

<Figure size 1800x600 with 6 Axes>

Understanding the visualization

Current Backscatter (dB): Radar signal intensity from the current observation date. Higher values (brighter/yellow) indicate stronger returns from rough surfaces, buildings, or wet soil. Lower values (darker/blue) indicate smooth surfaces like water bodies or very dry bare soil.

Average Reference (dB): Mean backscatter computed across all reference period acquisitions. This temporal average smooths out short-term variations and reveals persistent features like water bodies (consistently low backscatter) and urban areas (consistently high backscatter), which can be used for masking.

Surface Soil Moisture (SSM): Normalized values from 0 (dry) to 0.6 (wet) representing the relative moisture content of the top soil layer:

  • 0.0 - 0.2 (dark blue): Very dry soil conditions

  • 0.2 - 0.4 (blue-green): Moderately dry soil

  • 0.4 - 0.6 (green-yellow): Moist to wet soil

SSM is calculated by normalizing the current backscatter between the driest (minimum) and wettest (maximum) conditions observed during the reference period.