Dynamic soil moisture monitoring in shendong mining area using Temperature Vegetation Dryness Index

As a method to analyze the soil moisture, the NDVI-Ts space has aroused much attention. The paper uses the method of TVDI which calculated from the NDVI-Ts space to monitor the soil moisture status of Shendong mining area which is located in arid and semiarid area in Northwest China from 6 September to 8 November. The soil moisture status come from TVDI was consistent to the physiognomy types distribution. The west and southwest of mining area is desert beach corresponding to the area III (arid zone); the east and north-eastern of mining area is loess hilly region corresponding to area I (wet Area); in the northwest of mining area is mobile sand dunes and semi-fixed dunes, and in the south-east is typical grassland corresponding to region II (normal area). By carried out a linear correlation analysis between TVDI data and in-situ measured the soil moisture data in different depth of 0–5cm, 10cm, 20cm and 40cm, a significantly linear relationships (α0.05) existed. In the depth of 0–5cm, the linear relationship was even higher, reached 0.8201. The result showed that it was feasible to use the method of TVDI to dynamically monitor soil moisture.