Retrieval of soil moisture by artificial neural network using X-band ground based data

Abstract

Monitoring of soil moisture is very important to environmental studies, including hydrology, meteorology and their interactive fields. Today back propagation artificial neural networking is a well known and widely applied mathematical model for the remote sensing applications. For the soil moisture estimation an artificial neutral network (ANN) based algorithm is implemented and tested. The ANN model is calibrated (trained) and tested with the experimentally obtained data. The experimentally data is obtained by using X-band (9.5 GHz) scatterometer for different soil moistures viz. 10, 12, 18 and 22%. The measurement of the scattering coefficient was carried out over a range of incidence angle from 20° to 70° at the step of 5° for both the HH and VV polarization. Surface roughness (i.e. root mean square height) is taken constant as 0.5 cm for the whole experimentation. The performance of the ANN model is evaluated by the direct measured soil moisture and by the soil moisture estimated by the ANN model. Our work suggests that ANN modeling for such experimentation is a promising alternative for soil moisture estimation. The advantage of the ANN approach for soil moisture estimation is that it has potential for worldwide coverage.