All-Sky Soil Moisture Estimation over Agriculture Areas from the Full Polarimetric SAR GF-3 Data

Dayou Luo, Xingping Wen () and Junlong Xu
Additional contact information
Dayou Luo: Faculty of Land Resource Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650093, China
Xingping Wen: Faculty of Land Resource Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650093, China
Junlong Xu: Faculty of Land Resource Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650093, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 17, 1-12

Abstract: This study aims to estimate the soil moisture (SM) in all-sky agriculture areas using fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Gaofen-3 (GF-3) data. The radar vegetation index (RVI) is obtained using the radar SAR data, which overcomes the difficulty that the optical data cannot construct the vegetation index in cloud-covered areas. The RVI is introduced into the water cloud model (WCM) to remove the contribution of vegetation to the total radar backscatter σ 0 and obtain the soil backscattering coefficients σ soil 0 with HH and VV polarization. Subsequently, σ soil 0 and radar frequency data are introduced into the Chen model, and a semi-empirical model of SM estimation is established. The main findings of this study are as follows: (1) Compared with the σ 0 , the σ soil 0 obtained by the WCM has a stronger correlation with the SM. (2) In the cloud covered area, the accuracy of the estimated SM by synergistically using the WCM and the Chen model is ideal. An RMSE of 0.05 and a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.69 are achieved. In this study, the SM estimation method is not affected by clouds, and it shows many advantages for sustainable development, monitoring soil drought degree, and other related research.

Keywords: synthetic aperture radar (SAR); full polarimetric SAR; Gaofen-3 (GF-3); soil moisture (SM); water cloud model (WCM); Chen model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/17/10866/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/17/10866/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:17:p:10866-:d:902901

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().