Estimation of soil moisture content and surface roughness using oh model and scattering power decomposition

Abstract

Soil moisture content is an essential parameter in agriculture and hydrological processes. Using remote sensing, we can measure soil moisture content in real time over wide area. Oh model is one of the important models that characterize the scattering properties of the soil, and it can be reliably used to estimate the soil moisture content and surface roughness of the bare soil. However, the estimation accuracy of the Oh model decreases under the influence of vegetation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a modified method which first extracts the scattering component of the soil surface by using scattering power decomposition, and then applies Oh model for soil moisture and roughness estimation. In the experiment, we report the results on the measured data over a field and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.