Articles | Volume 28, issue 4
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-917-2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-28-917-2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
A comprehensive study of deep learning for soil moisture prediction
Yanling Wang
State Key Laboratory of Water Resources Engineering and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Liangsheng Shi
CORRESPONDING AUTHOR
State Key Laboratory of Water Resources Engineering and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Yaan Hu
State Key Laboratory of Hydrology, Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, Nanjing, China
Xiaolong Hu
State Key Laboratory of Water Resources Engineering and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Wenxiang Song
State Key Laboratory of Water Resources Engineering and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Lijun Wang
State Key Laboratory of Water Resources Engineering and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Related authors
Yanling Wang, Xiaolong Hu, Yaan Hu, Leilei He, Lijun Wang, Wenxiang Song, and Liangsheng Shi
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4440, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4440, 2025
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS).
Short summary
Short summary
This study introduces a new interpretable deep learning method that accurately predicts multi-depth soil moisture simultaneously without physical assumptions. The model provides insights into soil properties, while delivering precise predictions across diverse scenarios. Tested under various conditions, it outperforms traditional approaches, particularly when enhanced with basic physics. This tool can help improve water management by offering reliable and efficient soil moisture forecasts.
Yanling Wang, Xiaolong Hu, Yaan Hu, Leilei He, Lijun Wang, Wenxiang Song, and Liangsheng Shi
EGUsphere, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4440, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-4440, 2025
This preprint is open for discussion and under review for Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS).
Short summary
Short summary
This study introduces a new interpretable deep learning method that accurately predicts multi-depth soil moisture simultaneously without physical assumptions. The model provides insights into soil properties, while delivering precise predictions across diverse scenarios. Tested under various conditions, it outperforms traditional approaches, particularly when enhanced with basic physics. This tool can help improve water management by offering reliable and efficient soil moisture forecasts.
Yakun Wang, Xiaolong Hu, Lijun Wang, Jinmin Li, Lin Lin, Kai Huang, and Liangsheng Shi
Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 27, 2661–2680, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-27-2661-2023, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-27-2661-2023, 2023
Short summary
Short summary
To avoid overloaded monitoring cost from redundant measurements, this study proposed a non-parametric data worth analysis framework to assess the worth of future soil moisture data regarding the model-free unsaturated flow models before data gathering. Results indicated that (1) the method can quantify the data worth of alternative monitoring schemes to obtain the optimal one, and (2) high-quality and representative small data could be a better choice than unfiltered big data.
Ronny Meier, Edouard L. Davin, Gordon B. Bonan, David M. Lawrence, Xiaolong Hu, Gregory Duveiller, Catherine Prigent, and Sonia I. Seneviratne
Geosci. Model Dev., 15, 2365–2393, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-2365-2022, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-2365-2022, 2022
Short summary
Short summary
We revise the roughness of the land surface in the CESM climate model. Guided by observational data, we increase the surface roughness of forests and decrease that of bare soil, snow, ice, and crops. These modifications alter simulated temperatures and wind speeds at and above the land surface considerably, in particular over desert regions. The revised model represents the diurnal variability of the land surface temperature better compared to satellite observations over most regions.
Cited articles
Abbaszadeh, P., Moradkhani, H., and Zhan, X.: Downscaling SMAP radiometer soil moisture over the CONUS using an ensemble learning method, Water Resour. Res., 55, 324–344, 2019.
Abdel-Hamid, O., Mohamed, A. R., Jiang, H., Deng, L., Penn, G., and Yu, D.: Convolutional neural networks for speech recognition, IEEE T. Audio, Speech, 22, 1533–1545, https://doi.org/10.1109/TASLP.2014.2339736, 2014.
Ahmed, A. A. M., Deo, R. C., Ghahramani, A., Raj, N., Feng, Q., Yin, Z., and Yang, L.: LSTM integrated with Boruta-random forest optimiser for soil moisture estimation under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 global warming scenarios, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1851–1881 pp., https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-021-01969-3, 2021.
Ajit, A., Acharya, K., and Samanta, A.: A Review of Convolutional Neural Networks, Int. Conf. Emerg. Tr., 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1109/ic-ETITE47903.2020.049, 2020.
Albawi, S., Mohammed, T. A., and Al-Zawi, S.: Understanding of a convolutional neural network, Proc. 2017 Int. Conf. Eng. Technol., ICET 2017, Antalya, Turkey, 21–23 August 2017, IEEE: Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2017, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1109/ICEngTechnol.2017.8308186, 2018.
Azhar, A. H., Perera, B. J. C., and Nabi, G.: A Simple Soil Moisture Simulation Model to Address Irrigation Water Management Issues, Mehran Univ. Res. J. Eng. Technol., 30, 193–206, 2011.
Breiman, L.: Random forests, Mach. Learn., 45, 5–32, 2001.
Cai, Y., Zheng, W., Zhang, X., Zhangzhong, L., and Xue, X.: Research on soil moisture prediction model based on deep learning, PLoS One, 14, 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214508, 2019.
Camporese, M., Daly, E., and Paniconi, C.: Catchment-scale Richards equation-based modeling of evapotranspiration via boundary condition switching and root water uptake schemes, Water Resour. Res., 51, 5756–5771, 2015.
Carranza, C., Nolet, C., Pezij, M., and van der Ploeg, M.: Root zone soil moisture estimation with Random Forest, J. Hydrol., 593, 125840, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2020.125840, 2021.
Chen, Y., Li, L., Whiting, M., Chen, F., Sun, Z., Song, K., and Wang, Q.: Convolutional neural network model for soil moisture prediction and its transferability analysis based on laboratory Vis-NIR spectral data, Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs., 104, 102550, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2021.102550, 2021.
Connor, J. T., Martin, R. D., and Atlas, L. E.: Recurrent Neural Networks and Robust Time Series Prediction, IEEE T. Neural Networ., 5, 240–254, https://doi.org/10.1109/72.279188, 1994.
Cortes, C. and Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks, Mach. Learn., 20, 273–297, 1995.
Ding, Y., Zhu, Y., Wu, Y., Jun, F., and Cheng, Z.: Spatio-Temporal attention lstm model for flood forecasting, 2019 International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData), Atlanta, GA, USA, 458–465, https://doi.org/10.1109/iThings/GreenCom/CPSCom/SmartData. 2019.00095, 2019.
Ding, Y., Zhu, Y., Feng, J., Zhang, P., and Cheng, Z.: Interpretable spatio-temporal attention LSTM model for flood forecasting, Neurocomputing, 403, 348–359, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2020.04.110, 2020.
Dosovitskiy, A., Beyer, L., Kolesnikov, A., Weissenborn, D., Zhai, X., Unterthiner, T., Dehghani, M., Minderer, M., Heigold, G., Gelly, S., Uszkoreit, J., and Houlsby, N.: An Image is Worth 16 × 16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale, arXiv [preprint], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2010.11929, 2020.
Entin, J. K., Robock, A., Vinnikov, K. Y., Hollinger, S. E., Liu, S., and Namkhai, A.: Meteorologic i Land Surface, J. Geophys. Res., 105, 11865–11877, 2000.
Fang, K., Pan, M., and Shen, C.: The Value of SMAP for Long-Term Soil Moisture Estimation with the Help of Deep Learning, IEEE T. Geosci. Remote, 57, 2221–2233, https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2018.2872131, 2019.
Feng, D., Beck, H., de Bruijn, J., Sahu, R. K., Satoh, Y., Wada, Y., Liu, J., Pan, M., Lawson, K., and Shen, C.: Deep Dive into Global Hydrologic Simulations: Harnessing the Power of Deep Learning and Physics-informed Differentiable Models (δHBV-globe1.0-hydroDL), Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2023-190, in review, 2023.
Gill, M. K., Asefa, T., Kemblowski, M. W., and McKee, M.: Soil moisture prediction using support vector machines, J. Am. Water Resour. As., 42, 1033–1046, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-1688.2006.tb04512.x, 2006.
Goodfellow, I., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., and Bengio, Y.: Generative adversarial nets, Adv. Neur. In., 27, 2672–2680, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1406.2661, 2014.
Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y., and Courville, A.: Deep learning, MIT press, ISBN 0262035618, 2016.
Guswa, A. J., Celia, M. A., and Rodriguez-Iturbe, I.: Models of soil moisture dynamics in ecohydrology: A comparative study, Water Resour. Res., 38, 5-1–5-15, https://doi.org/10.1029/2001wr000826, 2002.
He, K., Zhang, X., Ren, S., and Sun, J.: Deep residual learning for image recognition, in: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, Las Vegas, NV, USA, 27–30 June 2016, 770–778, arXiv [preprint], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1512.03385, 2016.
Heathman, G. C., Cosh, M. H., Merwade, V., and Han, E.: Multi-scale temporal stability analysis of surface and subsurface soil moisture within the Upper Cedar Creek Watershed, Indiana, Catena, 95, 91–103, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2012.03.008, 2012.
Hochreiter, S. and Schmidhuber, J.: Long short-term memory, Neural Comput., 9, 1735–1780, 1997.
Holzman, M., Rivas, R., Carmona, F., and Niclòs, R.: A method for soil moisture probes calibration and validation of satellite estimates, MethodsX, 4, 243–249, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mex.2017.07.004, 2017.
Huang, G. Bin, Zhu, Q. Y., and Siew, C. K.: Extreme learning machine: Theory and applications, Neurocomputing, 70, 489–501, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2005.12.126, 2006.
Hummel, J. W., Sudduth, K. A., and Hollinger, S. E.: Soil moisture and organic matter prediction of surface and subsurface soils using an NIR soil sensor, Comput. Electron. Agr., 32, 149–165, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0168-1699(01)00163-6, 2001.
Hussain, D., Hussain, T., Khan, A. A., Naqvi, S. A. A., and Jamil, A.: A deep learning approach for hydrological time-series prediction: A case study of Gilgit river basin, Earth Sci. Inform., 13, 915–927, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12145-020-00477-2, 2020.
Jackson, S. H.: Comparison of calculated and measured volumetric water content at four field sites, Agr. Water Manage., 58, 209–222, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-3774(02)00078-1, 2003.
Jing, J. R., Li, Q., Ding, X. Y., Sun, N. L., Tang, R., and Cai, Y. L.: Aenn: a generative adversarial neural network for weather radar echo extrapolation, Int. Arch. Photogramm., 42, 89–94, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-3-W9-89-2019, 2019.
Kamilaris, A. and Prenafeta-Boldú, F. X.: Deep learning in agriculture: A survey, Comput. Electron. Agr., 147, 70–90, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2018.02.016, 2018.
Kilinc, H. C. and Yurtsever, A.: Short-Term Streamflow Forecasting Using Hybrid Deep Learning Model Based on Grey Wolf Algorithm for Hydrological Time Series, Sustainability, 14, 3352, https://doi.org/10.3390/su14063352, 2022.
Lecun, Y., Bengio, Y., and Hinton, G.: Deep learning, Nature, 521, 436–444, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539, 2015.
LeCun, Y.: Generalization and network design strategies, Connect. Perspect., 19, 143–155, 1989.
Li, Q., Hao, H., Zhao, Y., Geng, Q., Liu, G., Zhang, Y., and Yu, F.: GANs-LSTM Model for Soil Temperature Estimation from Meteorological: A New Approach, IEEE Access, 8, 59427–59443, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2982996, 2020.
Li, Q., Zhu, Y., Shangguan, W., Wang, X., Li, L., and Yu, F.: An attention-aware LSTM model for soil moisture and soil temperature prediction, Geoderma, 409, 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2021.115651, 2022a.
Li, Q., Li, Z., Shangguan, W., Wang, X., Li, L., and Yu, F.: Improving soil moisture prediction using a novel encoder-decoder model with residual learning, Comput. Electron. Agr., 195, 106816, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2022.106816, 2022b.
Liu, J., Rahmani, F., Lawson, K., and Shen, C.: A multiscale deep learning model for soil moisture integrating satellite and in situ data, Geophys. Res. Lett., 49, e2021GL096847, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL096847, 2022.
Liu, Y., Mei, L., and Ki, S. O.: Prediction of soil moisture based on Extreme Learning Machine for an apple orchard, CCIS 2014 – Proc. 2014 IEEE 3rd Int. Conf. Cloud Comput. Intell. Syst., Proc. Shenzhen, China, 27–29 November 2014, 400–404, https://doi.org/10.1109/CCIS.2014.7175768, 2014.
Lundberg, S. M., Erion, G. G., and Lee, S.-I.: Consistent Individualized Feature Attribution for Tree Ensembles, arXiv [preprint], https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1802.03888, 2018.
Mikolov, T., Kombrink, S., Burget, L., Èernocký, J., and Khudanpur, S.: Extensions of recurrent neural network language model, in: 2011 IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP), Prague, Czech Republic, 22–27 May 2011, 5528–5531, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5947611, 2021.
Patil, A. and Rane, M.: Convolutional Neural Networks: An Overview and Its Applications in Pattern Recognition, Smart Innov. Syst. Tec., 195, 21–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7078-0_3, 2021.
Pollack, J. B.: Recursive distributed representations, Artif. Intell., 46, 77–105, 1990.
Prakash, S., Sharma, A., and Sahu, S. S.: Soil moisture prediction using machine learning, in: 2018 Second International Conference on Inventive Communication and Computational Technologies (ICICCT), Coimbatore, India, 20–21 April 2018, 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1109/ICICCT.2018.8473260, 2018.
Prasad, R., Deo, R. C., Li, Y., and Maraseni, T.: Weekly soil moisture forecasting with multivariate sequential, ensemble empirical mode decomposition and Boruta-random forest hybridizer algorithm approach, Catena, 177, 149–166, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2019.02.012, 2019.
Qiu, Y., Fu, B., Wang, J., and Chen, L.: Spatiotemporal prediction of soil moisture content using multiple-linear regression in a small catchment of the Loess Plateau, China, Catena, 54, 173–195, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0341-8162(03)00064-X, 2003.
Ravuri, S., Lenc, K., Willson, M., Kangin, D., Lam, R., Mirowski, P., Fitzsimons, M., Athanassiadou, M., Kashem, S., Madge, S., Prudden, R., Mandhane, A., Clark, A., Brock, A., Simonyan, K., Hadsell, R., Robinson, N., Clancy, E., Arribas, A., and Mohamed, S.: Skilful precipitation nowcasting using deep generative models of radar, Nature, 597, 672–677, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03854-z, 2021.
Sampathkumar, T., Pandian, B. J., Rangaswamy, M. V, Manickasundaram, P., and Jeyakumar, P.: Influence of deficit irrigation on growth, yield and yield parameters of cotton–maize cropping sequence, Agr. Water Manage., 130, 90–102, 2013.
Saxton, K. E., Johnson, H. P., and Shaw, R. H.: Modeling Evapotranspiration and Soil Moisture, Trans. Am. Soc. Agric. Eng., 17, 673–677, https://doi.org/10.13031/2013.36935, 1974.
Schmidhuber, J.: Deep Learning in neural networks: An overview, Neural Networks, 61, 85–117, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2014.09.003, 2015.
Semwal, V. B., Gupta, A., and Lalwani, P.: An optimized hybrid deep learning model using ensemble learning approach for human walking activities recognition, J. Supercomput., 77, 12256–12279, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-021-03768-7, 2021.
Severyn, A. and Moschitti, A.: UNITN: Training Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Twitter Sentiment Classification, SemEval 2015, 9th Int. Work. Semant. Eval. co-located with 2015 Conf. North Am. Chapter Assoc. Comput. Linguist. Hum. Lang. Technol. NAACL-HLT 2015 – Proc., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 4–5 June 2015, 464–469, https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/s15-2079, 2015.
Shi, X., Chen, Z., Wang, H., Yeung, D. Y., Wong, W. K., and Woo, W. C.: Convolutional LSTM network: A machine learning approach for precipitation nowcasting, Adv. Neur. In., 28, 802–810, 2015.
Simunek, J., Van Genuchten, M. T., and Sejna, M.: The HYDRUS-1D software package for simulating the one-dimensional movement of water, heat, and multiple solutes in variably-saturated media, Univ. California-Riverside Res. Reports, 3, 1–240, 2005.
Sungmin, O. and Orth, R.: Global soil moisture data derived through machine learning trained with in-situ measurements, Sci. Data, 8, 1–14, 2021.
Sungmin, O., Orth, R., Weber, U., and Park, S. K.: High-resolution European daily soil moisture derived with machine learning (2003–2020), Sci. Data, 9, 1–13, 2022.
Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., and Le, Q. V: Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks, Adv. Neur. In., 27, 3104–3112, 2014.
Van der Maaten, L. and Hinton, G.: Visualizing data using t-SNE, J. Mach. Learn. Res., 9, 2579–2605, 2008.
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., and Polosukhin, I.: Attention is all you need, Adv. Neur. In., 30, 5998–6008, 2017.
Vereecken, H., Huisman, J. A., Bogena, H., Vanderborght, J., Vrugt, J. A., and Hopmans, J. W.: On the value of soil moisture measurements in vadose zone hydrology: A review, Water Resour. Res., 46, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1029/2008WR006829, 2008.
Vereecken, H., Amelung, W., Bauke, S. L., Bogena, H., Brüggemann, N., Montzka, C., Vanderborght, J., Bechtold, M., Blöschl, G., Carminati, A., Javaux, M., Konings, A. G., Kusche, J., Neuweiler, I., Or, D., Steele-Dunne, S., Verhoef, A., Young, M., and Zhang, Y.: Soil hydrology in the Earth system, Nat. Rev. Earth Environ., 3, 573–587, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00324-6, 2022.
Verma, S. and Nema, M. K.: Development of an empirical model for sub-surface soil moisture estimation and variability assessment in a lesser Himalayan watershed, Model. Earth Syst. Environ., 8, 3487–3505, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-021-01316-z, 2021.
Xia, K., Huang, J., and Wang, H.: LSTM-CNN Architecture for Human Activity Recognition, IEEE Access, 8, 56855–56866, https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2982225, 2020.
yanlingw: deep_learning_for_soil_moisture_prediction, Zenodo [data set and code], https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10060492, 2023.
Yu, J., Zhang, X., Xu, L., Dong, J., and Zhangzhong, L.: A hybrid CNN-GRU model for predicting soil moisture in maize root zone, Agr. Water Manage., 245, 106649, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2020.106649, 2021.
Short summary
LSTM temporal modeling suits soil moisture prediction; attention mechanisms enhance feature learning efficiently, as their feature selection capabilities are proven through Transformer and attention–LSTM hybrids. Adversarial training strategies help extract additional information from time series’ data. SHAP analysis and t-SNE visualization reveal differences in encoded features across models. This work serves as a reference for time series’ data processing in hydrology problems.
LSTM temporal modeling suits soil moisture prediction; attention mechanisms enhance feature...