An Information fusion approach for PALSAR data to retrieve soil moisture

Abstract

Estimation of vegetation covered soil moisture with satellite images is still a challenging task. Several models are available for soil moisture retrieval in which water cloud model (WCM) is most common. But, it requires an estimation of accurate vegetation parameterization. Thus, there is a need to develop such an approach for soil moisture retrieval which minimize these limitations. Therefore, this paper deals with the soil moisture retrieval using fully polarimetric SAR data by fusing the information from different bands. Various polarimetric indices and observables were critically analysed, and found that the index; SPAN (total scattered power) gives better information of vegetation cover as compared to other indices/observables. Based on this, WCM model has been modified using SPAN as parameter and soil moisture content were retrieved.

Keywords:

• Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• backscattering coefficient
• soil moisture
• SPAN

Acknowledgement

Authors are thankful to RailTel, Delhi, India, and DST-INRIA for supporting this work.