Evaluating a Global Soil Moisture dataset from a Multitask Model (GSM3 v1.0) for current and emerging threats to crops

Abstract. Climate change threatens our ability to grow food for a growing population. There are concurrent droughts and floods happening globally, with the greatest impacts felt in Africa. There is a need for high-quality soil moisture predictions in under-monitored regions like Africa. Yet it is unclear if soil moisture processes are globally similar enough to allow our models to maintain accuracy in unmonitored regions. We present a multitask long short-term memory (LSTM) model that learns simultaneously from global satellite-based and in-situ soil moisture data. This model is evaluated in both random spatial holdout mode and continental holdout mode (trained on some continents, tested on a different one). The model compared favorably to current land surface models, satellite products, and a candidate machine learning model, reaching a global median correlation of 0.792 for the random spatial holdout test. It behaved surprisingly well in Africa and Australia, showing high correlation even when we excluded their sites from the training set, but performed relatively poorly in Alaska where rapid changes are occurring. In all but one continent (Asia), the multitask model in the worst-case scenario test performed better than the soil moisture active passive (SMAP) 9-km product. Factorial analysis shows that the LSTM model’s accuracy with representing impacts of terrain aspect, resulting in lower performance for dry and south-facing slopes or wet and north-facing slopes. This knowledge helps us apply the model while understanding its limitations. This model is being integrated into an operational agricultural assistance application which currently provides information to 13 million African farmers.