You et al. (2026) Study and application of the profile-attenuation-based standardized soil moisture index

Identification

• Journal: Agricultural Water Management
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-08-22
• Authors: Ziyi You, Wei Pei
• DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110714

Research Groups

• College of Arts and Sciences, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, China
• National Meteorological Science Data Center, China

Short Summary

This study developed a Profile-Attenuation-based Standardized Soil Moisture Index (PASSMI) to improve the monitoring of spring agricultural drought in cold-region dryland agriculture. PASSMI was shown to be more sensitive than the conventional SSMI in identifying drought events and exhibited stronger consistency with actual agricultural drought impacts.

Objective

• To develop a more accurate and effective tool for monitoring spring agricultural drought in cold-region dryland agriculture.
• To investigate the spatial patterns and decadal evolution of spring agricultural droughts from 1980 to 2020 in the semi-arid region of western Heilongjiang Province, China.

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: Regional scale (western Heilongjiang Province, China)
• Temporal Scale: Long-term (41 years, 1980-2020)

Methodology and Data

• Models used:
  • Light Gradient Boosting Machine with Gaussian Process Regression (LightGBM-GPR) for soil moisture profile reconstruction.
  • Kriging and KNN-IDW for spatial interpolation.
• Data sources: CMA-RA reanalysis data, in-situ measurements.

Main Results

• PASSMI was shown to be more sensitive than SSMI in identifying drought events (58% improvement).
• PASSMI exhibited stronger consistency with actual agricultural drought impacts (2.3 times stronger correlation with crop yield anomalies).

Contributions

• This study provides a more effective tool for spring drought monitoring in cold-region dryland agriculture.
• The findings offer scientific support for water resource management and irrigation optimization in similar semi-arid environments.

Funding

• National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42161148001)
• Heilongjiang Province Science and Technology Innovation Fund (Grant No. YQ2021C011)

Citation

@article{You2026Study,
  author = {You, Ziyi and Pei, Wei},
  title = {Study and application of the profile-attenuation-based standardized soil moisture index},
  journal = {Agricultural Water Management},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110714},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agwat.2026.110714}
}