Detection of Soil Freeze/Thaw States at a High Spatial Resolution in Qinghai-Tibet Engineering Corridor

The freeze/thaw (F/T) state of the soil is an essential indicator for permafrost monitoring. However, current soil F/T products with a coarse spatial resolution (>1 km) have limited their use on a fine scale. In this letter, a new approach integrating two microwave sensors [i.e., Sentinel-1 and advanced microwave scanning radiometer 2 (AMSR-2)] is developed to identify the soil F/T state at a spatial resolution of 10 m in the Qinghai-Tibet engineering corridor (QTEC). Using a linear regression model to integrate the coarse AMSR-2 data with the finer Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) land surface temperature (LST), the frozen frequency product at a 1-km resolution can be obtained. Then, the high-spatial-resolution F/T map based on Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) time-series images can be produced using the threshold extracted from each pixel of frozen-frequency products. We tested soil F/T results via both visual and quantitative evaluations. The overall accuracy of the 10-m soil F/T map achieves 84.63% and 77.09% for ascending and descending orbits based on four meteorological stations, respectively.