6780 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 55, NO.
12, DECEMBER 2017
Triple Collocation-Based Merging of
Satellite Soil Moisture Retrievals
Alexander Gruber, Wouter Arnoud Dorigo, Wade Crow, and Wolfgang Wagner, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— We propose a method for merging soil moisture
retrievals from spaceborne active and passive microwave instru-
ments based on weighted averaging taking into account the
error characteristics of the individual data sets. The merging
scheme is parameterized using error variance estimates obtained
from using triple collocation analysis (TCA). In regions where
TCA is deemed unreliable, we use correlation significance levels
( p-values) as indicator for retrieval quality to decide whether to
use active data only, passive data only, or an unweighted average.
We apply the proposed merging scheme to active retrievals from
advanced scatterometer and passive retrievals from the Advanced
Microwave Scanning Radiometer—Earth Observing System
using Global Land Data Assimilation System-Noah to comple-
ment the triplet required for TCA. The merged time series is eval-
uated against soil moisture estimates from ERA-Interim/Land
and in situ measurements from the International Soil Moisture
Network using the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) current
Climate Change Initiative—Soil Moisture (ESA CCI SM) product
version v02.3 as benchmark merging scheme. Results show that
the p-value classification provides a robust basis for decisions
regarding using either active or passive data alone, or an
unweighted average in cases where relative weights cannot be
estimated reliably, and that the weights estimated from TCA in
almost all cases outperform the ternary decision upon which the
ESA CCI SM v02.3 is based. The proposed method forms the
basis for the new ESA CCI SM product version v03.x and higher.
Index Terms— Accuracy, least squares approximation, radar,
radiometers, remote sensing, soil moisture, uncertainty.
I. I NTRODUCTION
S OIL moisture is one of the key internal state variables
of the global hydrological cycle. Consistent global soil
moisture records are essential for studying hydrology driven
phenomena of the earth system such as climate, vegetation
growth, and many others [1]. The importance and feasibility
of global soil moisture monitoring through earth observation
were acknowledged by the Global Climate Observing
System (GCOS) via its endorsement as an essential climate
variable.
Some of the most important sources for global soil moisture
data records are microwave radar and radiometer instruments
Manuscript received May 17, 2017; revised June 26, 2017 and July 19,
2017; accepted July 19, 2017. Date of publication September 19, 2017;
date of current version November 22, 2017. This work was supported in
part by the eartH2Observe project through the European Union’s Seventh
Framework Programme under Grant 603608 and in part by the European
Space Agency Climate Change Initiative for Soil Moisture under Contract
4000104814/11/I-NB. (Corresponding author: Alexander Gruber.)
A. Gruber, W. A. Dorigo, and W. Wagner are with the Department
of Geodesy and Geoinformation, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna, Austria (e-mail:
alexander.gruber@geo.tuwien.ac.at).
W. Crow is with the Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory, U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, MD 20705-2350 USA.
This paper has supplementary downloadable material available at
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org., provided by the author.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TGRS.2017.2734070
0196-2892 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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mounted on satellites, which are available since 1978. Since
then, the number of available instruments has been growing
steadily, including missions that are specifically dedicated
to soil moisture monitoring such as the Soil Moisture and
Ocean Salinity (SMOS) [2] and the Soil Moisture Active Pas-
sive (SMAP) mission [3]. However, most available microwave
missions were not designed to observe soil moisture, and hence
their instruments have very different characteristics including
different frequency bands, polarizations, and wide incidence
angle ranges. In the view of soil moisture monitoring, all these
antenna characteristics provide individual advantages and
disadvantages, which make them more or less sensitive to
soil moisture and other surface conditions such as vegetation
density or radio frequency interference (RFI) contamination.
The long-term availability of various satellite-based sen-
sors with different spatiotemporal coverage and measurement
characteristics provides an opportunity for generating a value-
added product by merging soil moisture retrievals from differ-
ent instruments into a single data set following three main
purposes: 1) extending the temporal coverage beyond the
life time of single satellites by sequentially concatenating
data sets from different sensors; 2) increasing the temporal
measurement density in periods where multiple instruments
are available; and 3) reducing random errors with respect to
the single input data sets by averaging observations acquired
from different instruments with close observation times.
In 2012, the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated the
Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project for soil moisture,
in which global long-term multisatellite soil moisture data
records have been generated by merging various available
active and passive microwave-based soil moisture data sets [4].
This product, henceforth referred to as ESA CCI SM, not
only aims for providing a consistent soil moisture record from
1978 to the present, it also attempts to optimally combine
various products by applying a merging scheme when multi-
ple instruments are available. The merging scheme that was
employed in all ESA CCI SM data set versions up to the
latest (v02.3) is based on the following steps: 1) all active data
sets are combined into a merged active microwave product
by harmonizing their climatology; 2) all passive data sets
are combined into a merged passive microwave product by
harmonizing their climatology; and 3) a merged active–passive
data set is created based on the correlation between the merged
active and the merged passive time series as follows. If the
correlation at a certain location is above 0.65, then both active
and passive data are combined using an unweighted averaging.
If the correlation is lower, then the merged active data are
used if the multiyear average vegetation optical depth (VOD)
at this location exceeds a certain threshold while the merged
GRUBER et al.: TRIPLE COLLOCATION-BASED MERGING OF SATELLITE SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVALS
passive data are used when the mean VOD is below this
threshold. To harmonize the individual time series, they are
rescaled against the supposedly best active or passive input
data set in the merged active and merged passive product,
respectively, and against long-term soil moisture estimates
from a land surface model in the merged active–passive data
set using a cumulative distribution function (CDF)-matching
approach (for more details, see [4]–[7]).
However, the current ESA CCI SM merging scheme up
to version v02.3 is suboptimal in that it does not take into
account the (random) error characteristics of the individual
input data sets. For example, even though active soil moisture
retrievals are typically more accurate over more densely vege-
tated regions and passive soil moisture retrievals are typically
more accurate over more sparsely vegetated areas [5], [8],
this does not mean that the respective other product does
not contain useful complementary soil moisture information
as well. Likewise, a high correlation between active and
passive data does not necessarily mean that both data sets
are equally accurate. In this paper, we propose an improved
weighted-average based method for merging active and passive
satellite soil moisture retrievals. It takes into account the
individual error characteristics of the merged data sets, which
are estimated using triple collocation analysis (TCA) [9]. This
TCA-based merging scheme forms the basis of the next
ESA CCI SM product versions v03.x and later.
The proposed merging scheme and its theoretical back-
ground are presented in Section II. Data sets used for test-
ing the proposed novel merging approach are described in
Section III. An evaluation of the proposed method is shown
in Section IV. Conclusions and an outlook to future work are
provided in Section V.
II. T HEORY
Merging multiple satellite-based soil moisture data sets into
a single time series follows two main purposes: 1) increasing
the temporal sampling density and/or coverage and 2) reducing
random retrieval errors. The former can be achieved by simply
concatenating measurements from the different satellites while
averaging temporally close observations is required for the
latter. The requirements and consequences of both of these
approaches will be discussed in detail in the following sec-
tions. Note that even though we focus on merging satellite
soil moisture estimates in this paper, many of the concepts
are of general applicability.
A. Optimal Averaging
Optimality may be defined in different ways. Here we use
the term “optimal” in a least squares sense, i.e., that the
variance of residual random errors shall be minimized, which
is achieved through averaging observations from different
sources. If the magnitudes of the random errors inherent to
the data sets that are to be merged are not equal—which
is usually the case—such averaging requires a careful rela-
tive weighting [10]. Formally, such weighted average can be
written as
N
 SNRa
x =w x= wi x i (1)
i=1
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6781
where x is the averaged soil moisture estimate; x =
[x 1 , . . . , x N ] is a vector containing the temporally collocated
soil moisture estimates from the N different data sets that are
merged; and w = [w1 , . . . , w N ] is a vector containing the
weights  that are given to these estimates where wi ∈ [0, 1]
and i wi = 1. If the weights are chosen correctly, then
the random errors of the merged time series will be lower
than those of the individual input data sets. The magnitude of
the weights that lead to a maximum random error reduction
is determined by the individual random error characteristics
of the input data sets and can be derived from their error
covariance matrix
w = (1C−1 1)−1 1C−1
σε2x = (1C−1 1)−1 (2)
where C is the N × N error covariance matrix that holds
the random error variances σε2x of the input data sets in
i
the diagonals and their error covariances σεxi εxi in the off-
diagonals; 1 = [1, . . . , 1] is a ones-vector of length N;
and σε2x is the resulting random error variance of the merged
estimates.
B. Weight Estimation
In principle, the covariance matrix C and hence also
the weights w are time dependent and represent the error
(co)variance properties of each individual measurement. How-
ever, in practice, time-variant error (co)variance estimates are
seldom available, but it is often reasonable to assume them
to be stationary [11]. Following this assumption allows us to
estimate a single set of weights that is representative of the
entire merging period based on the individual (temporal) mean
error (co)variances of the data sets.
Recall that the purpose of this paper is to merge satellite soil
moisture retrievals from active and passive microwave instru-
ments. Since errors in such data sets are commonly assumed
to be independent [12], we will neglect error covariances in
this paper. A more detailed discussion on this assumption
is provided in Section V. As a consequence, C becomes a
diagonal matrix and only random error variance estimates are
required for estimating w. According to (2), the weights can
then be written as
σε2p σε2a
wa = wp = (3)
σε2a + σε2p σε2a + σε2p
where the subscripts denote the active (a) and the pas-
sive ( p) data set, respectively. Note that the weight estimator
in (2)—and hence also (3)—implicitly assumes that there
are no systematic differences between the data sets. This
assumption can be circumvented by deriving the weights from
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) properties instead from random
error variances [11], [13]
SNR p
wa = wp = (4)
SNRa + SNR p SNRa + SNR p
6782 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 55, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
with
βa2 σ2
SNRa =
σε2a
β 2p σ2
SNR p =
σε2p
where βa2 σ2 and β 2p σ2 are the variances of the jointly
observed true signal and the βi parameter represents a
systematic error in the active and the passive data set,
respectively. However, before these weights can be actually
applied to merge the data sets, at least relative systematic
differences have to be corrected for. This is usually done
by rescaling the data sets into a common data space in
which case deriving the weights from the rescaled data
sets using (3) converges—if done properly—to the opti-
mal weights as estimated by (4). In this paper, we derive
both rescaling parameters and random error variances using
TCA [11], [12], [14], [15].
C. Triple Collocation Analysis
TCA is the most popular method for estimating random
error variances or SNRs of remotely sensed soil moisture data
sets over larger scales in the absence of reliable ground refer-
ence data [16]. Furthermore, it allows for estimating relative
rescaling parameters between data sets that are optimal in a
sense that they take into account the individual random error
properties and match the variability of the jointly observed
signal [17]. TCA requires three collocated data sets with
orthogonal and mutually independent errors. Here we apply
TCA to the active and the passive data sets that are to be
merged, together with soil moisture estimates from a land
surface model that serves as the third data set in the triplet. The
rescaling coefficients and random error variances are estimated
from these data sets as
σa,m
β ap =
σ p,m
σa, p σa,m
σε2a = σa2 −
σ p,m
σ p,a σ p,m
2 2
σε p = σ p − (5)
σa,m
where β ap is used to linearly scale the passive against the active
data set [ pa = β ap ( p − p)+a]; and σi2 and σi, j are the data set
variances and covariances with the superscripts denoting the
active, the passive, and the modeled (m) data set, respectively,
as well as errors therein (εi ). For a detailed derivation of the
TCA estimators, we refer the reader to [11]. Note that it does
not matter which data set serves as scaling reference as this
does not impact the SNR properties of the rescaled or of the
merged time series.
D. Merging Noncollocated Observations
As mentioned earlier, merging data sets can also serve the
purpose of increasing temporal measurement density or overall
data coverage through concatenating the measurements of the
individual data sets instead of averaging them, for exam-
ple, if they are not close together due to different overpass
times, or if one product has data gaps due to RFI or other
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masking procedures. However, such concatenation results in
temporally varying random error properties of the merged time
series. That is, in cases where observations in the merged data
set are (weighted) averages of the input data sets, random
errors are reduced according to (2). In contrast, in cases
where single-sensor measurements are used, random errors
correspond to those of that sensor.
This may become problematic if one data set is of sig-
nificantly lower quality but with superior temporal sampling
such that it is regularly used to fill gaps in the other higher
quality data set. In this case, the (overall) quality of the merged
time series may reduce significantly. To avoid this, one can
set thresholds, for instance, a minimum SNR or a minimum
relative weight that one data set has to have in order to
be used for such gap filling. However, some tasks such as
runoff modeling or drought monitoring may favor an improved
temporal coverage over highest possible SNRs because they
depend more strongly on the observation update frequency
(see [18], [19]). Therefore, it is a highly application-dependent
task to find a best tradeoff between the lowest possible random
errors and the highest possible measurement density.
To support the process of finding such tradeoff, we present
here an analytical investigation of the relationship between
error properties of the input and merged data sets and the
ratio of averaged and single-sensor measurements, which may
provide guidance for selecting thresholds in specific use cases.
Therefore, consider the overall mean error variance of a
merged data set that contains both averaged measurements of
two data sets and single-sensor measurements of one of these
data sets
n x σε2x + n s σε2s
σ 2ε = (6)
n
where σ 2ε denotes the overall mean error variance; n x is the
number of days where both data sets are (weighted) averaged;
n s is the number of days where only single-sensor measure-
ments are used; and n is the total number of measurements
with n = n x + n s . We use only one sensor, denoted with the
superscript s, for gap filling. Since extending this analysis with
single-sensor measurements of the second data set is trivial,
we—for simplicity of presentation—omit this scenario.
From (2), (3), and (6), it follows that changes in σ 2ε can
be directly derived from changes in the relative weighting—
regardless of the absolute error variance or SNR of the data
sets—and the ratio between n x and n s . Let us therefore
express such relative change as a factor k in the random error
variance, which since k · σ 2ε ≡ k −1 · S N R ε corresponds to an
additive reduction of the SNR by 10 · log(k) in decibel units.
We choose the SNR as the main performance criterion because
it provides a more meaningful—and better intercomparable—
representation of data set quality than random error variances
alone, and decibel units to normalize its nonlinear behavior
for a more intuitive interpretation. For more details on the
SNR metric, we refer the reader to [13] and [11].
Fig. 1 shows the logarithmic SNR degradation (z-axis) as a
function of the relative number of single-sensor measurements
in the merged time series, i.e., gaps in the higher quality data
set (x-axis), and the weight that is given to the sensor that
GRUBER et al.: TRIPLE COLLOCATION-BASED MERGING OF SATELLITE SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVALS
Fig. 1. Relative SNR degradation when using single-sensor measurements
to fill gaps in a merged product. The x-axis shows the relative number of
single-sensor measurements in the merged time series, i.e., gaps in the higher
quality data set, the y-axis shows the weight that is given to the sensor that
is used for filling these gaps, and the z-axis shows the SNR degradation in
decibel units.
is used for filling these gaps according to the relative SNR
properties of both data sets (y-axis). If the weights are equally
distributed between the sensors (i.e., 0.5 for both sensors), then
the SNR reduction upon gap filling is bounded to 3 dB, which
is reached if the number of gaps converges to 100% (i.e., if one
of the data sets is used alone). If one data set has a weight
of 0.25, the SNR has already decreased by 3 dB if 33% of
observations in the other (better) data set are missing and filled
with that data set, and it can further decrease by up to another
3 dB when even more observations are missing and gap filled.
If the weight further decreases to 0.1, having 11% of data
missing and gap filled is already enough to cause a decline
of the SNR by 3 dB, and having more filled gaps leads to
an SNR degradation of up to 10 dB, i.e., the error variance
increases by more than a factor of eight.
As mentioned before, finding an optimal tradeoff in terms of
SNR properties and measurement density is highly application
dependent. The above-described analysis shall help finding
such tradeoff in specific use cases. For the remainder of this
paper, we focus on evaluating the random error reduction upon
weighted averaging of the proposed merging scheme in the
real data scenario presented below. For this purpose, we do
not consider gap filling with single-sensor observations and
use temporally collocated observations only.
III. DATA S ETS
The proposed TCA-based weighted average merging
scheme is tested globally using soil moisture retrievals from
the active Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) and the passive
Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer—Earth Observ-
ing System (AMSR-E). All collocated measurements avail-
able within their common observation period, i.e., Janu-
ary 2007 to October 2011, are used. Relative weights are
estimated from (3). Soil moisture measurements from the
Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS)-Noah model
serve as third data set to estimate the required error variances
as well as relative rescaling parameters by means of TCA
using (5). As shown in [20], TCA is prone to large estimation
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6783
uncertainties when applied to small samples. Following other
studies (see [8], [12], [13]), locations with less than 100 col-
located measurement triplets are removed from the analyses.
The merged time series is evaluated against soil moisture esti-
mates from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather
Forecasts (ECMWF) Reanalysis (ERA-) Interim/Land model
and in situ measurements drawn from the International Soil
Moisture Network (ISMN).
A. ASCAT
Soil moisture estimates from ASCAT are retrieved
from backscatter measurements of MetOp-A using the
TU Wien Water Retrieval Package (WARP) algorithm
version 5.6.5 R1 [21], [22]. ASCAT operates at
C-band (5.26 GHz); retrieved soil moisture estimates
are provided as degree of saturation on a 0.25◦ regular grid
and are temporally resampled to 00:00 UTC. The WARP
surface state flag [23] is used to remove measurements taken
under frozen or freezing/thawing conditions.
B. AMSR-E
Soil moisture estimates from AMSR-E are provided by the
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and retrieved using the Land
Parameter Retrieval Model version 5 [24]. Data are provided
in volumetric units on a regular grid with 0.25◦ grid spacing.
Only night time observations are used, which are temporally
resampled to 00:00 UTC. VOD estimates are used to mask out
retrievals with a high uncertainty due to dense vegetation [25].
RFI estimates are used to switch from C-band (6.9 GHz) to
X-band (10.7 GHz) retrievals in RFI-contaminated areas [24].
C. GLDAS-Noah
The GLDAS-Noah model version 2.1 provides continuous
soil moisture data for four different depth layers at a spatial
resolution of 0.25◦ in a 3-h sampling rate [26]. Only soil
moisture estimates from the top layer (0–10 cm) at 00:00 UTC
are used in this paper. In addition, GLDAS-Noah provides esti-
mates for soil temperature and snow water equivalent (SWE),
which are used to mask out satellite observations if the
soil temperature is below 0 ◦ C and the SWE is above 0%
as no reliable soil moisture retrieval is possible under such
conditions.
D. ERA-Interim/Land
ERA-Interim/Land is a global reanalysis of land-surface
parameters that provides continuous soil moisture data for
four different depth layers in a 6-h sampling rate on the
approximately 0.7◦ ECMWF T255 grid [27], [28]. The data are
resampled to 0.25◦ using a nearest neighbor approach. Only
soil moisture estimates from the top layer (0–7 cm) at
00:00 UTC are used in this paper.
E. ISMN
The ISMN is a data hosting facility that collects and
harmonizes data from networks and field campaigns world-
wide and makes them available on a centralized Web por-
tal (http://ismn.geo.tuwien.ac.at) [29], [30]. In this paper,
6784 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 55, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
Fig. 2. Spatial locations of the ISMN stations that are used for evaluation.
we consider all stations that lie within the temporally over-
lapping period of ASCAT and AMSR-E, i.e., January 2007 to
October 2011, and during this period have at least 50 mea-
surements coinciding with both ASCAT and AMSR-E within
a ±12 h window. Measurements from sensors that are placed
deeper than 10 cm below the surface are excluded. The ISMN
also flags suspicious measurements such as spikes or signal
saturation as well as measurements taken under frozen condi-
tions or exceeding physically meaningful value ranges, based
on automated quality control procedures [31]. Measurements
flagged as suspicious are excluded in this paper. In total,
789 stations from 31 networks meet the above-described
requirements. References to the individual networks can be
found in Table S1. Stations locations are shown in Fig. 2.
Note the strong spatial bias toward the United States.
IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
A. Weight Estimation
Relative weights for ASCAT and AMSR-E soil moisture
retrievals are derived from their respective error variances
which are estimated using TCA. However, TCA is known
to have limited reliability in certain regions, such as high
latitudes, due to a lower temporal coverage or excessively
poor retrieval quality for one or more data sets in the
triplet [11]. Therefore, TCA results are often deemed
unreliable if one or more members of the triplet are not
significantly correlated according to a (one-tailed) student’s
t-test (see [15], [32]).
Here we follow this approach and use correlation signifi-
cance levels between all three data sets, hereinafter referred to
as p-values, to select areas where to use TCA to calculate rela-
tive weights and, furthermore, to decide how to proceed in the
remaining geographic regions, i.e., to use only active retrievals,
to use only passive retrievals, or to apply an unweighted
averaging. Therefore, we empirically investigate for which
p-value combination each of these cases performs best in
terms of Pearson correlation with respect to our global evalu-
ation data set, i.e., ERA-Interim/Land. Note that the quality of
the chosen evaluation data set does not influence the relative
ranking of the estimated correlation coefficients as long as its
errors are not correlated with those of the satellite retrievals,
which is—for ERA-Interim/Land—commonly assumed to be
true [12], [33].
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TABLE I
M ERGING S CHEME BASED ON THE O NE -TAILED P EARSON
C ORRELATION S IGNIFICANCE B ETWEEN A CTIVE (a),
PASSIVE ( p), AND M ODELED (m) S OIL M OISTURE
W ITH A 0.05 S IGNIFICANCE L EVEL
Correlations are summarized for eight classes accord-
ing to the binary coded p-value combination and shown
in Fig. 3. The resulting decisions as to which class to use
single sensors, unweighted averages, or weighted averages
are shown in Table I; p-values are tested for a 0.05 sig-
nificance level. Since a one-tailed test is used, all negative
correlations are deemed not significant. The resulting decisions
follow intuition. If all three data sets correlate significantly
with each other, then the error variances, and hence the
averaging weights, can be estimated reliably from TCA, and
performing a weighted averaging provides the best correlations
with respect to the evaluation data set. On the other hand,
if neither of the data sets correlates significantly with any of
the others, then correlations with the evaluation data set are
close to zero both for the single-sensor data and weighted
or unweighted averages. Since in such cases we do not
know which of the data sets—if any—has a potential skill,
we disregard these pixels.
If ASCAT correlates significantly with GLDAS-Noah
but AMSR-E correlates neither with ASCAT nor with
GLDAS-Noah significantly, then ASCAT also shows signif-
icantly better correlations with the evaluation data set. In such
areas, we use ASCAT soil moisture retrievals only. If ASCAT
correlates significantly with both GLDAS-Noah and AMSR-E
but AMSR-E does not correlate significantly with the model,
then using ASCAT data alone still seems to be the best choice.
The reason for this may be that the relatively low SNR of
AMSR-E requires a low weight in a weighted average and
provides only a marginal SNR improvement compared with
GRUBER et al.: TRIPLE COLLOCATION-BASED MERGING OF SATELLITE SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVALS 6785

Fig. 3. Boxplot showing the correlations (y-axis) of ASCAT, AMSR-E, an unweighted average of both, and a weighted average of both with respect to
ERA-Interim/Land. Values on the x-axis represent the integer value associated with the binary combination of the decision “ p-value below 0.05” for the
correlations between AMSR-E and GLDAS, ASCAT and GLDAS, and ASCAT and AMSR-E, respectively (see Table I) and the numbers in brackets indicate
the number of pixels that were classified as such. Boxes represent the median and the interquartile range, and whiskers represent the 5% and 95% percentiles.
The text in red indicates the merging decision that was made according to Table I.

Fig. 4. Boxplot showing the correlations (y-axis) of ASCAT, AMSR-E, an unweighted average of both, and a weighted average of both with respect to
the ISMN stations. Values on the x-axis represent the integer value associated with the binary combination of the decision “ p-value below 0.05” for the
correlations between AMSR-E and GLDAS, ASCAT and GLDAS, and ASCAT and AMSR-E, respectively (see Table I) and the numbers in brackets indicate
the number of pixels that were classified as such. Boxes represent the median and the interquartile range, and whiskers represent the 5% and 95% percentiles.
The text in red indicates the merging decision that was made according to Table I.

using ASCAT alone (see Section IV-B), which makes the
performance of the weighted average more sensitive to weight
estimation uncertainties.
If both ASCAT and AMSR-E correlate significantly with
GLDAS-Noah but not with each other, an unweighted average
performs much better than the other options. If ASCAT cor-
relates significantly with AMSR-E but neither of the satellites
correlates significantly with GLDAS-Noah, an unweighted
average still seems to be the best choice yet the overall
correlation to the evaluation data set is much lower. This
may be an indication that ERA-Interim/Land and GLDAS-
Noah are not completely independent (see Section V) but
also that both ERA-Interim/Land and GLDAS-Noah may be
unreliable in these regions. However, such cases occur mainly
at very high latitudes, where land surface models are known
to have lower quality [7]. For this reason, we do not disregard

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6786 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 55, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
such pixels but consider the significant correlation between
ASCAT and AMSR-E as an indication that both may still
contain valuable soil moisture information even though the
correlation with respect to the evaluation data set is generally
low. Therefore, we perform an unweighted average in these
regions.
To independently evaluate the above described decisions,
we further calculate for each class the correlations between
all ISMN stations and the active-only, the passive-only,
the unweighted averaged, and the weighted averaged time
series, respectively, which are shown in Fig. 4. Due to their
very inhomogeneous spatial distribution (see Fig. 2), most of
the stations are located within pixels where all three data sets
are significantly correlated with each other (class 7). For the
other classes, only between 2 and 35 pixels are available,
which reduces the reliability of the quantile statistics due to
estimation uncertainties. Nonetheless, Fig. 4 confirms that the
decisions from Table I (use active-only, use passive-only, use
an unweighted average, or use a weighted average) do indeed
represent—on average—the best choice for all classes except
for pixels where only the active and the passive data correlate
significantly with each other (class 1). However, the mar-
ginal superiority of the median correlation between weighted
averages and ground measurements over that between
unweighted averages and ground measurements might well be
a result of estimation uncertainties due to the small sample
size (i.e., only 13 pixels are available for that class).
We can now convert the classification in Table I into: 1) rel-
ative weights of 0 and 1 for areas where ASCAT or AMSR-E
are used alone; 2) weights of 0.5 and 0.5 where an unweighted
average is used; and 3) TCA-based weights derived from (3)
where a weighted average is used. This results in the global
map of relative weighting between ASCAT and AMSR-E soil
moisture retrievals, which is shown in Fig. 5 together with
the weighting map that is currently employed in the ESA CCI
SM v02.3 data set.
In general, weight patterns agree very well. In areas where
the ESA CCI SM v02.3 scheme uses ASCAT alone, the
TCA-based merging scheme assigns relatively high weights
to ASCAT. Likewise, in areas where the ESA CCI SM v02.3
scheme uses AMSR-E alone, the TCA-based merging scheme
also assigns relatively high weights to AMSR-E. The most
significant difference is that the ESA CCI SM v02.3 data
set uses a ternary (i.e., three-class based) decision of using
ASCAT only, AMSR-E only, or an arithmetic mean of both,
whereas the TCA-based merging scheme allows for contin-
uous transitions between those classes. Remember that the
ESA CCI SM v02.3 merging scheme bases the sensor selection
mainly on VOD levels following the findings of recent studies
that active soil moisture retrievals tend to perform better over
more densely vegetated areas whereas passive soil moisture
retrievals tend to perform better over more sparsely vegetated
regions [6], [8]. Therefore, it is not surprising that the weights
estimated from TCA also closely follow global vegetation
patterns, which in turn provides evidence for their reliability.
In the following sections, we investigate the proposed blending
scheme in terms of general performance both analytically and
against evaluation data.
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B. Analytical Evaluation of the Merging Scheme
Remember that the main purpose of averaging soil moisture
estimates is the reduction of random errors with an optimum
reduction (in a least squares sense) being achieved if the
weights are derived from the random error variances of the
input data sets according to (2). The resulting random error
variance of the merged data set can be predicted using standard
error propagation and—for one active and one passive data set
with mutually uncorrelated errors—written as
σε2x = wa2 σε2a + w2p σε2p . (7)
From (7), it follows that the random error reduction with
respect to the single-sensor input products is—in multiplicative
terms—simply the inverse of the weight that is assigned to the
respective data set, which corresponds to an additive increase
of the logarithmic SNR by 10 · log(wi−1 ).
Fig. 6 shows such expected SNR improvement (in decibel
units) of the merged data set with respect to the better
performing input data set, i.e., either ASCAT or AMSR-E
depending on the location. No significant improvements are
achieved in areas where ASCAT or AMSR-E has a weight
close to one, i.e., where one data set is much better than
the respective other, whereas the largest improvements are
obtained in regions where the weights are equally distributed
among the sensors (i.e., 0.5 for both). As it was already shown
in Fig. 1, the expected magnitude of improvement in such
regions is 3 dB, meaning that the merging halves the random
error variance relative to that of the input data sets.
Note that this analytical analysis of SNR improvement
upon merging assumes that the error variance estimates used
to calculate the weights are error free. However, in reality,
the estimated error variances and hence weights will also be
subject to estimation uncertainties due to the limited number
of observations, possible violations of underlying assumptions
such as nonstationary errors, or representativeness errors in
both the spatial and the temporal domain resulting from
different spatial resolutions of the sensors and temporal decor-
relation of the observed signal due to different overpass times.
As a consequence, actual SNR improvements may fluctuate
more or less around the analytical predictions in Fig. 6.
Unfortunately, a global estimation of actual SNR improve-
ments is not straightforward. As mentioned earlier, TCA is
currently the only method capable of providing absolute SNR
estimates for soil moisture data sets over larger scales without
requiring highly accurate reference data. However, it requires
three data sets with mutually uncorrelated errors, which are
usually only available as one active, one passive, and one
modeled soil moisture product [11]. Therefore, the errors of
a merged active–passive soil moisture data set will almost
certainly be correlated to those of other active or passive
products. Moreover, the random errors of different land surface
models have been found to show a certain degree of cross
correlation [10], [34]. That is, it is impossible to form a
data set triplet with mutually uncorrelated random errors
that allows us to estimate absolute SNRs of the merged
active–passive data set. We therefore further evaluate the
merging scheme indirectly by calculating relative correlation
improvements with respect to two independent evaluation
GRUBER et al.: TRIPLE COLLOCATION-BASED MERGING OF SATELLITE SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVALS 6787

Fig. 5. (Top) Relative weights between ASCAT and AMSR-E soil moisture retrievals as used in the ESA CCI SM v02.3 merging scheme and the proposed
TCA-based merging scheme. (Bottom) The weight difference between the two merging schemes. White areas masked out because less than 100 collocated
measurements are available from ASCAT and AMSR-E.

data sources, i.e., ERA-Interim/Land and in situ soil moisture
stations.
C. Evaluation of the Merging Scheme Against
Reference Data
As benchmark for correlation improvements with respect to
the evaluation data, we use the merging scheme employed in
the ESA CCI SM v02.3 data set. For this benchmark scheme,
instead of rescaling the data using a CDF-matching approach
as it is done in official product, we match the mean and
the standard deviation only in order to avoid disturbances
in the correlation scores by matching higher order statistical
moments as this would disturb the estimated impact of the
actual merging.

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6788 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 55, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017

Fig. 6. SNR improvement in decibel units of the merged data set with respect to the superior single input data set, i.e., either ASCAT or AMSR-E, depending
on the geographic region. White areas masked out because less than 100 collocated measurements are available from ASCAT and AMSR-E.

Fig. 7. Difference in Pearson correlation between the proposed TCA-based merging scheme and ERA-Interim/Land, and the ESA CCI v02.3 merging scheme
and ERA-Interim/Land (without CDF matching). White areas masked out because less than 100 collocated measurements are available from ASCAT and
AMSR-E.

Fig. 8. (a) and (b) Difference in Pearson correlation between the proposed TCA-based merging scheme and ISMN stations, and the ESA CCI v02.3 merging
scheme and ISMN stations. (c) Difference in Pearson correlation between the proposed TCA-based merging scheme and ISMN stations, and the ESA CCI v02.3
merging scheme and ERA-Interim/Land.

Fig. 7 shows global correlation improvements in the pro- CDF matching) with respect to ERA-Interim/Land. Obviously,
posed TCA-based merging scheme over the ternary merg- correlation differences are zero if the weights given to the
ing scheme of the ESA CCI SM v02.3 data set (without sensors are equal in both merging schemes (see Fig. 5),

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GRUBER et al.: TRIPLE COLLOCATION-BASED MERGING OF SATELLITE SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVALS
Fig. 9. Flowchart of the proposed merging scheme.
i.e., in regions where both merging schemes use the same
single-sensor data set or an unweighted average.
In general, correlations improve in most regions of the
world. The magnitude of improvements follows the weight
differences, which provides evidence for the accuracy of the
estimated weights. However, negative correlation differences
can be found in some areas, indicating a performance decline,
but these are mainly areas where no weighting is employed
as advised by the p-value classification. Such areas are
found, for example, in northern latitudes where the p-value
classification suggests an unweighted average as opposed
to the ESA CCI SM v02.3 scheme that uses ASCAT data
alone, or western China where the ESA CCI SM v02.3 scheme
uses passive retrievals only while the p-value classification
again suggests the use of unweighted averages. While these are
examples that indicate flaws in the p-value classification, only
a few regions in which a weighted average is performed show a
correlation decline compared to the ESA CCI SM v02.3 merg-
ing scheme. Such cases can be found, for example, in the Great
Sand Sea Desert in Libya, where the weighting suggests a
strong usage of ASCAT retrievals as opposed to the AMSR-E
only usage in the ESA CCI SM v02.3 scheme. However,
spaceborne soil moisture retrievals, especially from active
microwave instruments, are generally difficult for deserts due
to very low SNRs [35]. However, further investigation why the
proposed merging scheme seems to fail in few small regions
is beyond the scope of this paper.
In general, we can conclude from Fig. 7 that relative
weights are estimated by TCA with reasonable accuracy
and lead to improvements in most regions of the world,
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6789
and that the employed p-value classification is—with a few
exceptions—capable of making plausible decisions in regions
where the reliability of TCA estimates is questioned. To further
strengthen these conclusions, we repeat the analysis with
in situ soil moisture measurements as second independent
evaluation data source.
Fig. 8 shows the correlation improvements of the pro-
posed TCA-based merging scheme over the ESA CCI SM
v02.3 merging scheme with respect to all in situ soil mois-
ture stations of the ISMN that provide at least 50 measure-
ments coinciding with the merged data set, and compares
these improvements with those relative to ERA-Interim/Land
(at spatially coinciding locations). Note that the spatial avail-
ability of in situ stations is very scarce and they are mainly
located in the contiguous United States, which may bias the
overall picture (see Fig. 2). However, results are consistent
with those from the model based evaluation. Improvements
are almost always positive and spatial patterns correlate with
R = 0.70, which further strengthens the reliability of the
estimated weights and provides further evidence for the supe-
riority of the TCA-based blending scheme.
V. C ONCLUSION
We propose a method for merging soil moisture retrievals
from spaceborne active and passive microwave instruments
based on weighted averaging taking into account the error
characteristics of the individual data sets. This method forms
the basis for the new ESA CCI SM product version v03.x
and higher. A flowchart of the proposed algorithm is shown
in Fig. 9.
The merging scheme is parameterized using error variance
estimates obtained from using TCA. In regions where TCA is
deemed unreliable, we use correlation significance levels
( p-values) as indicator for retrieval quality to decide
whether to use active data only, passive data only, or an
unweighted average. We apply the proposed merging scheme
to active retrievals from ASCAT and passive retrievals from
AMSR-E in the period from 2007 to 2011 using GLDAS-Noah
to complement the triplet required for TCA, and evaluate the
obtained merged time series against soil moisture estimates
from ERA-Interim/Land and in situ measurements from the
ISMN using the ESA CCI SM v02.3 data set as benchmark
merging scheme. Results show that the p-value classification
provides—with few exceptions especially in northern latitudes
and desert areas—a robust basis for decisions regarding using
either active or passive data alone, or an unweighted average
in cases where relative weights cannot be estimated reliably,
and that the weights estimated from TCA in almost all cases
outperform the ternary decision upon which the ESA CCI
SM v02.3 is based. However, a few limitations and open issues
should be mentioned.
In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of the pro-
posed TCA-based merging scheme using one active and one
passive soil moisture data set, respectively, which are assumed
to have uncorrelated errors. However, including multiple active
and/or passive satellite data sets, as done in the ESA CCI SM
product, theoretically requires the parameterization of error
cross covariances in addition to error variances in order
6790 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 55, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2017
to estimate the optimal magnitude of the relative weights.
Recently, [34] proposed an extension to TCA where the
inclusion of more than three data sets in the analysis allows
for—at least partly—resolving nonzero error cross-correlation
structures, yet a demonstration of the robustness of the method
on a global scale is still pending. Therefore, one may for
practical reasons neglect error cross correlations between
different active or passive data sets at the cost of nonoptimal
SNR improvements, or make a conservative educated guess
for error cross-correlation levels for data sets where they are
expected.
Gruber et al. [34] further showed that different land surface
models—such as GLDAS-Noah and ERA-Interim/Land—may
also be prone to error cross correlation, which puts the
reliability of ERA-Interim/Land as independent evaluation
data set into question. However, in theory, GLDAS-Noah
serves merely as an instrument in the analysis to resolve
the relationship between the two satellite instruments [36].
Therefore, its own inherent error properties should not affect
the magnitude of the estimated merging weights. That said,
TCA estimates random errors with respect to a signal that
is jointly observed by all members of the triplet. Therefore,
processes unresolved by the model may indeed change the
error variance, and hence weight estimates, attributed to the
satellite soil moisture retrievals. For this reason, we rely
on the ground reference measurements as an indicator of
whether or not to trust the model-based evaluation keeping
in mind that certain regional effects may not have been fully
captured due to limited spatial availability of ground stations,
for example, in high latitudes.
Another important assumption that we—and most TCA-
based studies—make is the stationarity of random errors. How-
ever, while for many applications, e.g., for validation purposes,
it might be sufficient to estimate an average random error
variance for a certain investigation period, other applications
such as data assimilation usually prefer error estimates on
a per-measurement basis. Attempts have already been made
to use moving-window-based TCA approaches to estimate
seasonally varying error variances [37], yet the significantly
lower sample size of such methods hampers their reliability
so that lumped average random error estimates might still be
the more reliable choice.
Moreover, in addition to seasonal variations in the random
error variance of satellite soil moisture observations, [38] has
shown that random errors generally manifest differently on
different time scales. That is, lower frequency components in
an observation time series, i.e., its seasonal cycle, may have
different random error characteristics than its higher frequency
components, i.e., anomalies. Draper and Reichle [39] have
already shown that assimilating soil moisture observations
on different time scales may be superior to the assimilation
of the lumped time series. Similarly, also the merging of
satellite soil moisture data sets could potentially benefit from
a multitimescale-based error characterization, i.e., where sep-
arate weights are estimated for different time scales.
Future work will focus on applying the proposed
TCA-based merging scheme to the whole fleet of microwave
instrument-carrying satellites that are currently being merged
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into the official ESA CCI SM product, and for this pur-
pose, we are currently investigating solutions to: 1) cope
with nonzero error cross-correlations in the weight parame-
terization; 2) estimate seasonally varying weights using a
nonstationary TCA approach; 3) estimate random errors on
different time scales to further improve relative weightings;
and 4) modify the TCA implementation by excluding model
data from the analysis in order to obtain a fully model-
independent merged multisatellite soil moisture product.
Finally, we want to point out that TCA has already been
applied successfully in other fields of hydrometeorology,
oceanography, and ecology (see [40]–[44]). Therefore, even
though demonstrated for soil moisture, the proposed method
is potentially transferable to other biogeophysical variables.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the in situ data providers
for sharing their data with the International Soil Moisture
Network.
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Wade Crow received the Ph.D. degree from Prince-
ton University, Princeton, NJ, USA, in 2001.
He is currently a Research Physical Scientist and
a Project Lead Scientist with the Hydrology and
Remote Sensing Laboratory, Agricultural Research
Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Beltsville,
MD, USA. He has been with the science teams for
the NASA GPM, Hydros, SMAP, and AirMOSS
missions. His research interests include the devel-
opment of hydrologic and agricultural applications
for remote sensing data and the development of
appropriate data assimilation approaches to facilitate this goal—with a special
emphasis on techniques that fuse information from various disparate remote
sensing sources.
Dr. Crow was an Editor of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal
of Hydrometeorology.

Alexander Gruber was born in Vienna, Austria,

in 1988. He received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) degree
in geodesy and geophysics and the Dr.techn. (Ph.D.)
degree in surveying and geoinformation, both with
excellence, from the Vienna University of Technol-
ogy, Vienna, in 2013 and 2016, respectively.
Since 2011, he has been a Researcher and a
Lecturer with the Research Group Remote Sensing,
Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Vienna
University of Technology, and has been involved
in a large number of research projects. He has
authored or co-authored a large number of peer-reviewed journal papers,
conference papers, and book chapters. His research interests include geophys-
ical parameter retrieval with a focus on soil moisture retrieval from synthetic
aperture radar and scatterometer instruments, error characterization of earth
observation datasets, up and downscaling techniques, and data assimilation.
Dr. Gruber is a reviewer for many SCI journals in the field of remote sensing
and earth observation.
Wolfgang Wagner (M’98–SM’07) was born in
Wouter Arnoud Dorigo received the M.Sc. degree Wels, Austria, in 1969. He received the Dipl.Ing.
in physical geography with an emphasis on remote (M.Sc.) degree in physics and the Dr.techn. (Ph.D.)
sensing from Utrecht University, Utrecht, The degree in remote sensing, both with excellence, from
Netherlands, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in remote the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien),
sensing from the Technical University of Munich, Vienna, Austria, in 1995 and 1999, respectively.
Munich, Germany, in 2008. From 1999 to 2001, he was with the German
From 2002 to 2006, he was with the Imag- Aerospace Agency. In 2001, he was a Professor of
ing Spectroscopy Group, German Remote Sens- remote sensing with TU Wien. Since 2012, he has
ing Data Center, German Aerospace Center, been the Head of the Department of Geodesy and
Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. Since 2007, he has Geoinformation, TU Wien. He is the Co-Founder
been a Researcher, a Lecturer, and a Scientific and the Head of Science of the Earth Observation Data Center for Water
Project Coordinator with the Research Group Remote Sensing, Department Resources Monitoring, Vienna, Austria. His research interests include geo-
of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Vienna University of Technology (TU physical parameter retrieval techniques from remote sensing data such as
Wien), Vienna, Austria, where he is currently a Professor in climate and scatterometry, SAR, full-waveform airborne laser scanning, and application
environmental remote sensing. He has authored or co-authored more than development.
60 publications in refereed journal papers and conference proceedings. Using Dr. Wagner is a member of the Science Advisory Groups for
earth observation data, he tries to understand and quantify the dynamics and Sentinel-1 (ESA), METOP ASCAT, METOP-SG SCA (EUMETSAT and
interactions of vegetation and the water cycle in a changing climate. His ESA), and GCOS/GTOS/WCRP Terrestrial Observation Panel for Climate.
research interests include remote sensing of soil moisture and vegetation, with From 2008 to 2012, he was an ISPRS Commission VII President. From
a focus on geophysical parameter retrieval through physical and semiempirical 2009 to 2011, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Access Journal Remote
methods, calibration and validation, process automation, up and downscaling, Sensing. During his master’s and Ph.D. studies, he received fellowships to
image classification, data merging, and time series analysis. carry out research at the University of Bern, Atmospheric Environment Service
Dr. Dorigo was a recipient of the 2015 Science Award of TU Wien for the Canada, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the European Space Agency,
water cycle in a changing climate. and the Joint Research Center of the European Commission.

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