Soil Moisture retrieval using SAR data
During the preparation for the launch of the first UK SAR mission NovaSAR-S, an airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) flight campaign was scheduled and run in the south UK in cooperation with Airbus, in order to acquire S-band and X-band datasets (concurrently) on several scenarios and for different applications in June 2014. Further to our request Airbus The purpose of the current study is to show some of the results of the research project AS14–12 aimed at assessing S-band performance in retrieving soil moisture in bare or poorly vegetated areas.
Among the objectives of the study was the comparison with X-band dataset and, at this purpose, the Integral Equation Model (IEM) Inversion through an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was considered a suitable technique at both frequencies and applied.
Retrieval results at both frequencies are presented in the full paper against ground truth collected on the site concurrently with the airborne datasets. They show that, for the application considered, the retrieval from S-band data is more accurate than that from X-band with an average error smaller than 4%.
You can read the entire article in the following link:
