Intercomparison of recent microwave satellite soil moisture products on European ecoregions

Several satellite microwave-based soil moisture (SM) products have become available in recent years, making possible to produce different datasets at continental and/or a global scale. Numerous variables, including geographic heterogeneity, weather and climate, and land cover, have an impact on these products' accuracy. In this study, we account for all these variables by using the ecoregions as the scale of analysis and conducting a thorough comparison of satellite products with ground-based SM measurements. The whole Europe has been selected as study area, considering it as the aggregation of several ecoregions, each of them classified as an homogeneous zones, in terms of climate, vegetation and potentially investigable soil cover. Selected SM satellite data includes: i) the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) SMAP L4 V5; ii) the European Space Agency (ESA) SMOS-IC V2.0; iii) the H115 and H116 SM products in time-series format generated by analyzing data collected by the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) aboard MetOp satellites; iv) the CGLS SSM 1 km obtained by the radar onboard ESA’s SENTINEL-1 platforms; and v) the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative for Soil Moisture (ESA CCI SM) “COMBINED” ESA CCI SM v06.1 product, created by merging satellite-based passive/active microwave measurements. Such a variety, in terms of technologies and main features, of publicly available online SM products (in their up-to-date version), allowed for a comprehensive intercomparison against in situ measurements of the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN), that spreads across all of Europe within the above-mentioned terrestrial ecoregion, using four different metrics, i.e., r, bias, ubRMSE and r/rANOM. Overall the intercomparison has underlined how SMAP L4 and ESA CCI show the best performance regardless of the considered metric. ASCAT has achieved best performances among non-modeled/blended products, while SMOS-IC has showed slightly better performance than the CGLS SSM 1 km. Using ecoregions allowed to further characterize the differences of each satellite products and identify the areas where all these products are more reliable (e.g., group (1) made by ecoregions as the Cantabrian Mixed forests or the Balkan Mixed forests; or group 2 made by ecoregions which belong to Mediterranean area) or less performing (e.g., the Central European mixed forests and the Pontic steppe). Hence, these classes have been further analyzed exploiting the ERA5-Land data, in terms of the SM, air temperature, precipitation, evaporation and Leaf area index. The research has provided helpful insights into how the performance of particular SM satellite products changes based on both the characteristics of the product under consideration and the area under investigation (i.e., one ecoregion compared to another).