Soil moisture retrieval using L-band radiometer and ground-penetrating radar

The objective of this study was to evaluate two remote-sensing methods for mapping the surface soil moisture of a bare soil, namely L-band radiometry using brightness temperature and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) using surface reflection inversion. Invasive time-domain reflectometry (TDR) measurements were used as a reference. A field experiment was performed in which these three methods were used to map soil moisture after controlled heterogeneous irrigation that ensured a wide range of water content. The heterogeneous irrigation pattern was reasonably well reproduced by both remote-sensing techniques. For GPR, the effect of roughness was excluded by operating at low frequencies (0.2-0.8 GHz) that were not sensitive to the field surface roughness. For the radiometer, the effect of roughness was accounted for using an empirical model that required calibration with the reference TDR measurements. The root mean square (RMS) error between soil moisture measured by GPR and TDR was 0.038 m³ m^-3 while the RMS error between radiometer (horizontal and vertical polarizations)and TDR-derived soil water content was 0.020 m³ m^-3. These results suggest that both remote-sensing techniques are promising for field-scale mapping of surface soil moisture over bare soils.