Monitoring of Water and Tillage Soil Erosion in Agricultural Basins, a Comparison of Measurements Acquired by Differential Interferometric Analysis of Sentinel TopSAR Images and a Terrestrial LIDAR System

Francisco A. Sánchez-Crespo (), María Teresa Gómez-Villarino, Eutiquio Gallego, José M. Fuentes, Ana I. García and Francisco Ayuga
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Francisco A. Sánchez-Crespo: BIPREE Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
María Teresa Gómez-Villarino: BIPREE Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Eutiquio Gallego: BIPREE Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
José M. Fuentes: BIPREE Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Ana I. García: BIPREE Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain
Francisco Ayuga: BIPREE Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 2, 1-21

Abstract: Agricultural production, the main pillar of food security, is highly dependent on soil quality, and threatened by erosion processes that degrade soil quality. This article is part of a research to verify the usefulness of differential interferometric analysis on TopSAR (Terrain Observation with Progressive Scans SAR, Synthetic Aperture Radar) images to measure water and tillage erosion in small agricultural basins. For this, images from the Sentinel 1 mission are used, analyzing the deformations on the earth’s surface. The purpose of this research is to verify the accuracy of the proposed method by comparing its measures with the ones taken with the gold standard laser terrestrial LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system, as well as to establish a basic step period framework that guarantees an admissible loss of coherence. The results on a pilot plot in El Molar (north of Madrid, Spain) showed that the differences lay within the range of the error associated with the very LIDAR system and showed that coherence losses correspond with the deformations measured. Given the economic and labor advantages of the differential interferometric analysis, this method could be regarded as an excellent alternative to the use of LIDAR in large-scale studies for measuring ground deformation caused by water and tillage erosion.

Keywords: erosion; Sentinel-1; SAR; interferometry; LIDAR (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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