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

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.