Title :
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
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;
Conference_Titel :
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2001. IGARSS '01. IEEE 2001 International
Conference_Location :
Sydney, NSW
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-7031-7
DOI :
10.1109/IGARSS.2001.976051
