Surface parameter inversion scheme over agricultural fields with crop residues and under low vegetation cover from RADARSAT-2 imagery

Many research studies have investigated the retrieval of surface parameters for bare soils. This study attempts to take into account agricultural fields with crop residues and low vegetation cover. An adaptive two-component decomposition (ATCD) method is developed in this paper to invert surface parameters in these fields. The study area is located in Southwestern Ontario, Canada where two wheat fields and two corn-residue fields are selected as sample sites. Three fully polarimetric RADARSAT-2 data, which were acquired in 2013 and 2014 respectively, are employed for the validation. The ATCD has 100% inversion rate compared with the Bragg and X-Bragg models, while its root mean square errors (RMSE) of the soil moisture and roughness have the lowest value of 6.72% and 0.33, respectively. The derived soil moisture in wheat field also has the lowest RMSE value of 3.97% compared with the Y-CIEM.