The Potential Use of Multi-Band SAR Data for Soil Moisture Retrieval over Bare Agricultural Areas: Hebei, China

The potential use of TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 data for soil moisture retrieval over bare agricultural areas was investigated using both empirical and semi-empirical approaches. For the empirical approach, the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model was used with two cases: (1) using only one C-band o...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Remote sensing (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2016-01, Vol.8 (1), p.7-7
Main Authors: Zhang, Xiang, Chen, Baozhang, Fan, Hongdong, Huang, Jilei, Zhao, Hui
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Agricultural equipment
Dubois model
Empirical analysis
Moisture content
Radarsat
Radarsat-2
Remote sensing
Retrieval
Soil moisture
Soil surfaces
SVR
TerraSAR-X
X-band
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The potential use of TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 data for soil moisture retrieval over bare agricultural areas was investigated using both empirical and semi-empirical approaches. For the empirical approach, the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model was used with two cases: (1) using only one C-band or X-band image; and (2) using a pair of C-band and X-band images jointly. For the semi-empirical approach, the modified Dubois model based on C-band and X-band SAR data was developed to estimate soil moisture content. The experiments were implemented over two bare agricultural areas, and in-situ measurements were carried out to assess the methods. The results showed that the TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 are suitable remote sensing tools for the estimation of surface soil moisture, with an accuracy of about 3 vol % (root mean square error, RMSE) over bare agricultural areas. Compared with the results obtained by Radarsat-2 data, TerraSAR-X data gives a slight improvement in estimating soil moisture. The accuracy of the soil moisture estimation was improved further when the two bands SAR data were used (RMSE of about 2.2 vol %) instead of only one. Moreover, the modified Dubois model showed comparable accuracy to the empirical model independent of the surface roughness.
ISSN:2072-4292
2072-4292
DOI:10.3390/rs8010007