Зондирование водного эквивалента снежного покрова широкополосными электромагнитными импульсами с борта БПЛА

Abstract

In this paper the possibility of snow cover remote sensing from an unmanned aerial vehicle-quadrocopter (UAV) with using a broadband pulse of 1.05 ns duration was investigated on the agricultural field near Minino village, Krasnoyarsk Territory from November 23, 2020 to March 4, 2021. A log-periodic antenna (from 1.36 GHz to 4.89 GHz bandwidth) and a compact vector network analyzer CABAN R60 (LLC Planar, Chelyabinsk) were used to generate, emit and receive broadband pulses. It is shown that both ground-based and remote sensing from the UAV, the time delays between pulses reflected from the air-snow and snow-soil interface linearly depend on the snow water equivalent, measured at the test site. The slope of these linear dependences is determined by the average density of the snow cover. The obtained experimental results show the promising of development of remote sensing technology for radar mapping of the main characteristics of the snow cover from UAV, which can supplement the information support of existing systems used in precision farming.