<title>Estimating soil moisture distribution using polarimetric airborne SAR</title>

Abstract

The goal of this study is to develop an algorithm for estimating the surface soil moisture and surface roughness using polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. In this study, an algorithm was applied to polarimetric airborne SAR data to estimate distributions of surface soil moisture and roughness. To validate the estimated soil moisture, we simultaneously conducted an experiment in October 1999 in Tsukuba Science City, Ibaragi Prefecture of Japan. Surface soil moisture was obtained by the Time- Domain Reflectometry (TDR) method, and the horizontal profiles of the land surface height were measured by a comb- style instrument for calculating the surface roughness parameters in test sites. Because the problem is site- specific and depends upon the measurement accuracy of both the ground truth data, the SAR system including speckle noise, and the effects of vegetation and artificial constructions, such as buildings, houses, roads, and roadside trees, the comparison results did not agree well with measured and inferred soil moisture.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.