SOIL MOISTURE ANALYSIS OF LALITPUR DISTRICT UTTAR PRADESH INDIA USING LANDSAT AND SENTINEL DATA

Abstract. Soil moisture is the available water content within the voids of soil particles. Remote sensing and GIS technique provide an advance & better information to extract the soil moisture of Lalitpur district Uttar Pradesh. The Landsat-8 OLI+TIRS (Optical Level Imager +Thermal Infrared Sensor) data (2013–18) and Sentinel 2A & 2B data (2015–18) was used to retrieve soil moisture content for the period 2013–2018. The optical and thermal bands were used to retrieve Land surface temperature (LST), NDVI and NDWI of Lalitpur district for the different years. Using land surface temperature encompasses with NDVI and NDWI the moisture content of the soil was estimated for the study area.Using Advance Microwave Scanning Radiometer-2, (2013–18) (AMSR-2) data and measurement of soil moisture through in-situ (Field) soil samples collections for soil moisture estimation was used to check the accuracy of the output resulted from Landsat and Sentinel data. This study results that; the output obtained from Landsat-8 in comparison to Sentinel data provide an accurate and better information of soil moisture at a high resolution.