Upscaling dryland carbon and water fluxes with artificial neural networks of optical, thermal, and microwave satellite remote sensing

[摘要] Earth's drylands are home to more than two billion people, provide key ecosystem services, and exert a large influence on the trends and variabilityin Earth's carbon cycle. However, modeling dryland carbon and water fluxes with remote sensing suffers from unique challenges not typicallyencountered in mesic systems, particularly in capturing soil moisture stress. Here, we develop and evaluate an approach for the joint modeling ofdryland gross primary production (GPP), net ecosystem exchange (NEE), and evapotranspiration (ET) in the western United States (US) using a suite ofAmeriFlux eddy covariance sites spanning major functional types and aridity regimes. We use artificial neural networks (ANNs) to predict drylandecosystem fluxes by fusing optical vegetation indices, multitemporal thermal observations, and microwave soil moisture and temperature retrievals fromthe Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) sensor. Our new dryland ANN (DrylANNd) carbon and water flux model explains more than 70 % of monthlyvariance in GPP and ET, improving upon existing MODIS GPP and ET estimates at most dryland eddy covariance sites. DrylANNd predictions of NEE wereconsiderably worse than its predictions of GPP and ET likely because soil and plant respiratory processes are largely invisible to satellitesensors. Optical vegetation indices, particularly the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and near-infrared reflectance of vegetation(NIR v ), were generally the most important variables contributing to model skill. However, daytime and nighttime land surface temperaturesand SMAP soil moisture and soil temperature also contributed to model skill, with SMAP especially improving model predictions of shrubland,grassland, and savanna fluxes and land surface temperatures improving predictions in evergreen needleleaf forests. Our results show that acombination of optical vegetation indices and thermal infrared and microwave observations can substantially improve estimates of carbon and waterfluxes in drylands, potentially providing the means to better monitor vegetation function and ecosystem services in these important regions that areundergoing rapid hydroclimatic change.

[学科分类] 大气科学