Vegetation and soil characteristics in SIR-C data

The authors compared polarimetric C- and L-band and ground truth data from bare soil, young wheat and mature maize fields of the agricultural test site Flevoland in the Netherlands collected during the SIR-C campaign in April and October 1994. The authors find that the L-band is more sensitive to the soil roughness than the C-band. In particular L-band HH gives the best discrimination between different degrees of soil roughness. The influence of young wheat with a ground cover of less than 25% is first noticeable in the C-band co-polarised correlation coefficient. By applying a decomposition technique to resolve different backscatter components in polarimetric data the authors find that the backscatter from mature maize fields is dominated by the vegetation in the C-band, while both the soil and vegetation contribute significantly to the backscatter in the L-band