Dual-Polarimetry for Soil Moisture Inversion at X-Band

Conference: EUSAR 2014 - 10th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar
06/03/2014 - 06/05/2014 at Berlin, Germany

Proceedings: EUSAR 2014

Pages: 4Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Jagdhuber, Thomas; Hajnsek, Irena; Caputo, Maurizio; Papathanassiou, Konstantinos P. (Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Schafmattstr. 6, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland; German Aerospace Center, Muenchner Str. 20, 82234 Wessling, Germany)

Abstract:
Dual-polarimetric, coherent (HH/VV) data of TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X are used for soil moisture estimation under changing agricultural vegetation cover. Therefore a dual-polarimetric hybrid decomposition and inversion technique is developed including physically-based scattering models for soil (IEM) and vegetation (particle scattering model). The algorithm, applied on the dual-polarimetric X-band data, synthetically derives a crosspolarization channel for the quantification of the vegetation volume intensity within the decomposition. As a result soil moisture with an inversion rate of 50-69% can be mainly derived on bare and light vegetated soils in the beginning and in the end of the vegetation growth period at X-band. A reason for the heterogeneous inversion results with varying quality (RMSE between 6.3-19.5vol.%) might be also the selection of the best fitting vegetation volume type for appropriate removal of the vegetation scattering component before moisture inversion.