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Estimating error cross-correlations in soil moisture data sets using extended collocation analysis
DOI:10.1002/2015JD024027.png)
Abstract
En 中文
Global soil moisture records are essential for studying the role of hydrologic processes within the larger earth system. Various studies have shown the benefit of assimilating satellite-based soil moisture data into water balance models or merging multisource soil moisture retrievals into a unified data set. However, this requires an appropriate parameterization of the error structures of the underlying data sets. While triple collocation (TC) analysis has been widely recognized as a powerful tool for estimating random error variances of coarse-resolution soil moisture data sets, the estimation of error cross covariances remains an unresolved challenge. Here we propose a methodreferred to as extended collocation (EC) analysisfor estimating error cross-correlations by generalizing the TC method to an arbitrary number of data sets and relaxing the therein made assumption of zero error cross-correlation for certain data set combinations. A synthetic experiment shows that EC analysis is able to reliably recover true error cross-correlation levels. Applied to real soil moisture retrievals from Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-EOS (AMSR-E) C-band and X-band observations together with advanced scatterometer (ASCAT) retrievals, modeled data from Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS)-Noah and in situ measurements drawn from the International Soil Moisture Network, EC yields reasonable and strong nonzero error cross-correlations between the two AMSR-E products. Against expectation, nonzero error cross-correlations are also found between ASCAT and AMSR-E. We conclude that the proposed EC method represents an important step toward a fully parameterized error covariance matrix for coarse-resolution soil moisture data sets, which is vital for any rigorous data assimilation framework or data merging scheme.
Keywords:
soil moisture
triple collocation
error characterization
error cross-correlation
data assimilation
validation
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