Deep Learning for Soil Moisture Estimation: Fusing Satellite Data with Optimally-Lagged Meteorological Features
About
Accurate soil moisture estimation in semi-arid agricultural regions requires integrating remote sensing and meteorological information while accounting for the delayed response of soil moisture to atmospheric forcing. This study introduces a Cross-Correlation Function (CCF) methodology to determine optimal temporal lags (0-30 days) between meteorological variables and soil moisture, as well as inter-depth lags (0-15 days) describing vertical moisture propagation from the surface (10 cm) to deeper layers (20-50 cm). The approach was validated across seven agricultural plots in southeastern Spain. Three deep learning architectures, each targeting a distinct prediction granularity, were evaluated under five feature configurations ranging from satellite-only to full satellite-meteorology-depth fusion: a CNN for per-pixel estimation within each plot, an LSTM for frame-level (daily plot-mean) prediction, and a CNN-LSTM hybrid operating on sliding windows with pooled multi-patch training. Models were assessed on held-out data to measure genuine generalisation. Meteorological variables improved performance over the satellite-only baseline, while subsurface depth information proved decisive across all architectures. The per-pixel CNN achieved the strongest single-patch result (R^2 = 0.877, RMSE = 2.28), with a seven-patch average R^2 of 0.535, representing an improvement of +1.00 over the satellite-only baseline. The pooled CNN-LSTM hybrid obtained the highest overall performance (R^2 = 0.930, CVRMSE = 8.0%). These results demonstrate that explicitly modelling atmospheric and vertical subsurface delays substantially improves soil moisture estimation for precision agriculture.