Using polarimetric sar data to infer soil moisture from surfaces with varying subsurface moisture profiles

Author

Khankhoje, Uday K. ; Van Zyl, Jakob ; Kim, Yunjin ; Cwik, Thomas

Author_Institution

Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

22-27 July 2012

Firstpage

1453

Lastpage

1456

Abstract

A time-series approach is used to estimate the moisture content based on polarimetric SAR data. It is found that under the assumption of constant soil moisture, empirically observed relationships between radar backscatter and moisture are only half as sensitive to moisture as compared to actual radar data. A numerical finite element method is used to calculate the radar backscatter for rough soils with arbitrarily varying soil moisture as a function of depth. Several instance of drying and wetting moisture profiles are considered and the radar backscatter is calculated in each case. Radar backscatter is found to crucially depend on the soil moisture variation in the top half wavelength of soil.

Keywords

backscatter; moisture; radar polarimetry; remote sensing by radar; synthetic aperture radar; time series; polarimetric SAR data; radar backscatter; soil moisture; subsurface moisture profile; time series; Backscatter; Moisture; Radar; Rough surfaces; Soil moisture; Surface roughness; Finite element methods; Monte Carlo simulations; electromagnetic scattering by rough surfaces; subsurface sensing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2012 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Munich

ISSN

2153-6996

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1160-1

Electronic_ISBN

2153-6996

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2012.6351261

Filename

6351261