O. Taconet et al., TAKING INTO ACCOUNT VEGETATION EFFECTS TO ESTIMATE SOIL-MOISTURE FROMC-BAND RADAR MEASUREMENTS, Remote sensing of environment, 56(1), 1996, pp. 52-56
Estimation of surface soil moisture is one of the major potential appl
ications of radar remote sensing. The European Remote Sensing Satellit
es (ERS 1 and 2) are equipped with a Synthetic Aperture Radar working
at C-Band (5 Ghz) using a rather low incidence angle (23 degrees). For
this frequency and angle, the effect of soil roughness and vegetation
attenuation are not negligible. Therefore, it is difficult to estimat
e the surface soil moisture using an algorithm that could be valid for
the entire year. In this article it is shown, that, for wheat canopy,
it is possible to apply an empirical relation for correcting for the
effect of vegetation. The proposed algorithm is derived from a data se
t acquired over several years (from 1988 to 1994) using an airborne ra
dar. It uses a simple cloud model to describe the vegetation attenuati
on. This algorithm does not need very precise information on. vegetati
on density and yields a final precision for the moisture content on th
e order of 0.05 cm(3)/cm(3).