MEASURING AND VERIFYING OF SOIL MOISTURE IN DESERT STEPPE FROM DIFFERENT SPATIAL SCALING

Soil moisture (SM) plays a decisive function during the grassland degradation and restoration process. In this paper, SM in desert steppe is measured with various methods at different spatial scale, including point-, field-and regional-scale, and the SM results from FDR, CRS and remote sensing (RS) are verified mutually. The results show that CRS is adaptable to measure desert steppe, of which with FDR R-2 is 0.83 and RMSE is 0.0162kg/kg; substituting CRS SM validated for traditional point measurement to verify RS retrieval, a much stronger correlation is achieved with R-2 of 0.97 much bigger than that of FDR and RS, whose R-2 is only 0.80, proving quantifiably that CRS is obviously a new effective means for verifying SM of RS retrieval.