[New index for soil moisture monitoring based on deltaT(s)-albedo spectral information]

Monitoring soil moisture by remote sensing has been an important problem for both agricultural drought monitoring and water resources management. In the present paper, we acquire the land surface temperature difference (deltaT(s)) and broadband albedo using MODIS Terra reflectance and land surface temperature products to construct the deltaT(s)-albedo spectral feature space. According to the soil moisture variation in spectral feature space, we put forward a simple and practical temperature difference albedo drought index (TDADI) and validate it using ground-measured 0-10 cm averaged soil moisture of Ningxia plain The results show that the coefficient of determination (R2) of both them varies from 0.36 to 0.52, and TDADI has higher accuracy than temperature albedo drought index (TADI) for soil moisture retrieval. The good agreement of TDADI, Albedo/LST, LST/ NDVI and TVDI for analyzing the trends of soil moisture change supports the reliability of TDADI. However, TDADI has been designed only at Ningxia plain and still needs further validation in other regions.