Synergic Use of SAR And Optical Data for Estimation of Soil Moisture in Vegetative Region

Abstract

Measuring the spatial distribution of soil moisture in the vegetative area is important for agricultural research and applications. In this paper, we have proposed the soil moisture estimation method in the vegetative area which uses minimum apriori information and low cost in terms of manpower and real-time field survey. For the development of this method, we have used VV backscattering from Sentinel-1 SAR and red band from Sentinel-2 optical images which are freely available worldwide. Along with this, we have also used anisotropy (A) as an intermediate parameter for the estimation of dielectric constant (ε) in the vegetative area. The estimated values of dielectric constant show good correlation with dielectric constant (ε') inverted using ground soil moisture samples. At last, estimated values of dielectric constant (ε) using the proposed method is successfully used for the estimation of surface soil moisture in the vegetative area.