Abstract
Wind farms have been proved to have potential impact on the ecology. As an important ecological factor, soil moisture has a great impact on the ecosystem. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the effect of wind farms on soil moisture. At present, the remote sensing data can be used to calculate the soil moisture of wind farm conveniently, but its spatial resolution is poor. Moreover, the measured soil moisture can't express the spatial difference. Therefore, through the effective combination of remote sensing data and measured data, this method can accurately judge the impact of wind farm on soil moisture. This method investigated wind farms located in the grasslands of China. Remote sensing images and field data were used to explore the area and extent of influence of wind farms on grassland soil moisture. We use Landsat images and field measurements to derive a linear relationship between the soil moisture and the TVDI, which was calculated based on the land surface temperature and NDVI, was developed in this work. The correlation was used to reverse spatial distribution map of soil moisture before and after the construction of wind farms. The diurnal and seasonal variation of the influence of the wind farm on the grassland soil moisture was also judged.•This method of combining measurement and remote sensing provides a reference for analysing the influence of wind farms on soil moisture.•This method can be used for reference to compare the meteorological factors of different wind directions before and after the construction of wind farms.