Comparison of sentinel 2A MSI and Landsat 8 OLI for soil organic matter inversion in southwestern Shandong province, China

Abstract

It remains to be explored whether some new multispectral satellite images with more available bands and higher spatial resolution have better inversion capability for soil organic matter (SOM). Taking southwestern Shandong Province of China as the research area, this article compared the performance of Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel 2A Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) data for SOM quantitative inversion. The results indicate that, the model including red-edge 1 band of Sentinel 2A MSI was determined as the best model, as the validation R² increased by 0.106, the RMSE decreased by 0.565 g/kg, and RPD increased by 0.163 compared with the model on Landsat 8 OLI image. The SOM distribution characteristics inversed on the best model were consistent with that on the measured samples. Therefore, the Sentinel 2A MSI can obtain better results than Landsat 8 OLI for the regional SOM inversion in the southwestern Shandong Province of China.

Keywords:

• Soil organic matter
• remote sensing
• Sentinel 2A MSI
• Landsat 8 OLI
• multiple linear stepwise regression

Acknowledgements

We thank the ESA for maintaining Sentinel-2A MSI dataset and research groups for providing the measured SOM data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province of China, grant number ZR2019MD039; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant number 41877003.