Soil, Plant and Water Sciences

Biography

Biography: Simone Pascucci

Abstract

An accurate estimate of surface soil moisture (SSM) using the actual remote sensing technology is still a demanding and expensive task due to surface moisture spatial-temporal variability and to the scale problems characteristic of this application. Many authors has highlighted the importance of measuring and monitoring SSM at various spatial scales. Soil moisture is a variable that affects a wide range of processes that occur in the land-atmosphere interface, including water infiltration, water outflow, evaporation, heat and gas exchange, infiltration of solutes, erosion. The thermal properties that control the soil daily range of temperature are the soil thermal conductivity and the soil heat capacity, and, therefore, variations in SSM have a strong impact on soil thermal properties being an intrinsic factor of soil surface temperature changes. Within this context, we explored the potential of integrating high spatial resolution TASI-600 airborne thermal and WorldView 2 optical satellite remote sensing data for SSM mapping, based on literature thermal inertia models. Two airborne campaigns were carried out on April 2018 with the TASI-600 multispectral thermal sensor on the Petacciato (Molise, Italy) area. Concurrently, soil samples were collected in different fields of the study area to determine their moisture content and granulometric composition. Results highlight that SSM changes in the different analyzed fields influence the diurnal thermal behavior of soil surface temperature. Moreover, the applied methodology has allowed to produce a SSM map with a good accuracy for a wide area interested by periodic recurrence of extensive landslides, which also involves highway and railway infrastructures. Furthermore, within the study area a correspondence between the areas affected by landslides and the areas with high SSM was established.