A Cross-System Remote Sensing Framework for Diagnosing Event-Scale Soil Wetting, Vertical Propagation, and Precipitation Thresholds Across China’s Croplands

Soil moisture (SM) remote sensing is widely used for agricultural drought monitoring, yet most applications still emphasize static moisture states rather than event-scale wetting responses. We developed an interpretable Earth observation (EO) framework to evaluate precipitation–SM product consistency and diagnose wetting processes across China’s croplands. Multi-source precipitation and SM products, including ERA5-Land, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), Soil Moisture of China by in situ data (SMCI), Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS), and Grid-based Precipitation dataset for Mainland China (CHM_PRE), were assessed using lagged consistency between rainfall forcing and relative soil moisture increments. The selected pairing was then used to model daily wetting increments at three depths with eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Shapley additive explanations (SHAPs), generalized additive models (GAMs), and quantile regression (QR). ERA5-Land precipitation paired with ERA5-Land SM showed the strongest reanalysis-constrained event-scale consistency (peak mean r = 0.43 at a 1-day lag), providing an internal-consistency baseline for comparison with independent satellite-derived combinations rather than an absolute accuracy ranking. EO-derived wetting signals showed depth-dependent lags, with a 1-day surface response and an approximately 2-day delayed profile signal at 28–100 cm; this pattern should not be interpreted as direct evidence of rapid physical infiltration to 100 cm. Precipitation transition thresholds followed a U-shaped dependence on antecedent wetness, with higher rainfall requirements under extremely dry and near-saturated states. These findings indicate that event-scale EO diagnostics can characterize product consistency, lagged wetting responses, and state-dependent precipitation thresholds, while same-system and deep-layer interpretations remain constrained by reanalysis coupling and model-assisted root-zone products.