Abstract
Soil moisture plays an important role in agriculture, hydrology, plants' seasonal growth cycle, and their sustainability under climate change. This letter presents a novel method for regional mapping of soil moisture with partial vegetation cover by using dual-polarized Sentinel-1 C-band SAR data. Model-based retrieval of soil moisture from radar backscatter under partial vegetation cover first necessitates the separation of the backscatter of the underlying soil from total radar backscatter and then the implementation of an inversion technique to estimate its soil moisture content from the backscattering coefficient of the underlying soil. The regional mapping of soil moisture was verified with in situ measurements along a climatic gradient (650-100 mm/year) in central Israel. A good agreement between the estimated soil moisture and the measured from ground samples was found, with an R2 of 0.793 with an RMSE of 0.047.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2500205 |
| Journal | IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters |
| Volume | 20 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Jan 2023 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Inversion technique
- Sentinel-1
- polarimetric radar vegetation index (PRVI)
- soil moisture
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
