Journal Article

Comparison of spatial interpolation methods for soil moisture and its application for monitoring drought

Fan, Li, Wu, Wei, Liu, Hong-Bin, Chen, Hui

2017

Overview

Soil moisture data can reflect valuable information on soil properties, terrain features, and drought condition. The current study compared and assessed the performance of different interpolation methods for estimating soil moisture in an area with complex topography in southwest China. The approaches were inverse distance weighting, multifarious forms of kriging, regularized spline with tension, and thin plate spline. The 5-day soil moisture observed at 167 stations and daily temperature recorded at 33 stations during the period of 2010–2014 were used in the current work. Model performance was tested with accuracy indicators of determination coefficient ( R 2 ), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean square error (RMSE), relative root mean square error (RRMSE), and modeling efficiency (ME). The results indicated that inverse distance weighting had the best performance with R 2 , MAPE, RMSE, RRMSE, and ME of 0.32, 14.37, 13.02%, 0.16, and 0.30, respectively. Based on the best method, a spatial database of soil moisture was developed and used to investigate drought condition over the study area. The results showed that the distribution of drought was characterized by evidently regional difference. Besides, drought mainly occurred in August and September in the 5 years and was prone to happening in the western and central parts rather than in the northeastern and southeastern areas.

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution / China / Daily temperatures / Data processing / Distance / Drought / Droughts / Earth and Environmental Science / Ecology / Ecotoxicology / Environment / Environmental Management / Environmental monitoring / Environmental Monitoring - methods / Environmental science / Errors / Interpolation / Interpolation methods / kriging / Kriging interpolation / Mean square errors / model validation / Modelling / monitoring / Monitoring/Environmental Analysis / Performance assessment / Root-mean-square errors / Soil / Soil - chemistry / Soil investigations / Soil moisture / Soil properties / Soil temperature / soil water / Spatial Analysis / Stations / Statistical methods / Temperature / Terrain / topography / Topography (geology) / Weighting