Use of Geospatial Technologies for Soil Moisture Mapping: Case Study of Bäveån Basin (Sweden)

Soil moisture is an important unit of the hydrological cycle and affects the amount of water available for groundwater recharge (or deep percolation) and surface runoff. In addition, analysis of soil moisture plays a critical role in assessing land degradation, desertification and flooding. Soil moisture is usually determined in the field by point-based measurements, but this method is laborious and costly, although it gives accurate results. In this study, we will alternatively detect soil moisture distribution in the Bäveån Basin by satellite imagery.

For the analysis phase, I obtained the Landsat 8 Collection 2 Level 1 satellite image of 05.06.2022 from USGS Earth Explorer, and the polygon data showing the basin boundary from the Swedish Meteorology and Hydrology Institute (SMHI).

For the analysis phase, we first add the border polygon data, multispectral image, and band 10 to our project;

Fig. 1: The data to be used has been added to the project

Since we will only analyze the catchment area, we clip the image according to the basin boundaries;

Fig. 3: Clipping the image according to the basin boundaries