Preliminary results on soil moisture mapping in Alessandria area (Northern Italy) using Envisat A-SAR

Author

Bignami, C. ; Pierdicca, N. ; Pulvirenti, L. ; Ticconi, F. ; Paloscia, S. ; Pettinato, S. ; Santi, E. ; Solbø, Stian

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. Eng., Rome "La Sapienza" Univ., Italy

Volume

5

fYear

2004

fDate

20-24 Sept. 2004

Firstpage

3529

Abstract

This work present some experimental campaigns aiming to assess the potential of monitoring soil moisture by ENVISAT ASAR (Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar). Soil moisture measurements were carried out on November 2003 and June 2004 close to Alessandria (Northern Italy) by using a TDR probe simultaneously to ENVISAT overpasses. In situ measurements had been collected in agricultural fields that were subsequently identified on ENVISAT ASAR images by means of a geo-coding process. Pixels of each area have been averaged in order to compute the mean backscattering coefficient. Results have been derived concerning the sensitivity of the backscattering coefficient to soil-moisture compared to what is predicted by a semi-empirical scattering model.

Keywords

artificial satellites; backscatter; hydrological techniques; moisture measurement; radar imaging; remote sensing by radar; soil; synthetic aperture radar; AD 2003 11 to 2004 06; Alessandria area; ENVISAT ASAR; Northern Italy; advanced synthetic aperture radar; backscattering coefficient; geo-coding process; soil moisture mapping; Backscatter; Moisture measurement; Polarization; Probes; Rivers; Rough surfaces; Satellites; Soil measurements; Soil moisture; Surface roughness;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2004. IGARSS '04. Proceedings. 2004 IEEE International

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8742-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2004.1370471

Filename

1370471