Is SAR capable of mapping small-scale spatial patterns of soil moisture?

Author

Western, Andrew ; Sadek, Tarek ; Wang, Li ; Grayson, Rodger ; Turral, Hugh ; Troch, Peter

Author_Institution

Dept. of Civil & Environ. Eng., Univ. of Melbourne, Vic., Australia

Volume

1

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

40

Abstract

We assess the potential for measuring spatial patterns of soil moisture using SAR at spatial resolutions down to 15 m. Highly detailed ground data on soil moisture and dielectric constant were collected in the 10.5 ha Tarrawarra experimental catchment in south-eastern Australia. C-band SAR measurements by ERS-1, ERS-2 and AirSAR provided no useful information on the spatial moisture pattern. Empirical comparisons suggest that L and P-band AirSAR data contain useful information on the soil moisture pattern, but this could not be extracted using a semi-empirical inversion algorithm. The spatial average moisture was successfully obtained from the L-band AirSAR data

Keywords

hydrological techniques; microwave measurement; moisture measurement; remote sensing by radar; soil; AirSAR data; Australia; C-band; L-band data; P-band data; SAR; Tarrawarra experimental catchment; dielectric constant; small-scale spatial patterns; soil moisture; spatial average moisture; spatial resolutions; Dielectric constant; Dielectric measurements; Electromagnetic heating; Hydrology; Image resolution; Remote monitoring; Remote sensing; Soil measurements; Soil moisture; Spatial resolution;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2001. IGARSS '01. IEEE 2001 International

Conference_Location

Sydney, NSW

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7031-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2001.976051

Filename

976051