Including Radar Soil Moisture into Two-Source Energy Balance Model for Improving Turbulent Fluxes Estimates

Surface soil moisture (SM) is an essential component for crop water stress detection and irrigation management. It controls soil evaporation and plant transpiration. SM dynamics is temporally related to root zone soil moisture which is the primary measure of the plant's water status. The aim of this work is to assess the robustness of high-resolution SM product derived from remote sensing on the energy balance based latent and sensible heat fluxes. Radar SM products retrieved from Sentinel-1 data only combined with Landsat Normalized Difference Vegetation index and land surface temperature are used together to feed the energy balance model TSEB-SM to estimate turbulent fluxes. The model estimates have been evaluated against the Eddy-covariance measurements over an irrigated wheat field situated in the Haouz plain in the center of Morocco. The results are very encouraging, with few observed anomalies meanly linked to the retrieved Priestley Taylor coefficient that is affected by SM.