Evaluation of polarimetric decomposition for soil moisture retrieval over vegetated agricultural fields

This study presents a simplified polarimetric decomposition for soil moisture retrieval under vegetation cover. After removing the volume scattering contribution in the full polarimetric SAR signature, only the surface scattering component is used to retrieve the soil moisture. The simplified algorithm is evaluated on the dense time series of UAVSAR data and detailed ground truth measurements covering the whole crop growth period. The results show that the performance of the soil moisture retrieval depends on both the crop types and the phonological developing stage. The fields covered by soybean obtain better results than other crop type, due to the low crop height and biomass. This study validate the potential of polarimetric decomposition for soil moisture retrieval over vegetated agricultural fields.