Soil moisture can be derived easily from active remote sensing technique. Synthetic Aperture Radars are now widely used to retrieve soil moisture since it can penetrate up to few centimeters of soil layers. This study aims to estimate the soil moisture using satellite observations from RISAT-1. This paper incorporates the usage of Loew and Topps model for the estimation of soil moisture. Since there is strong correlation between the dielectric constant and the soil moisture, the dielectric constant was calculated using the Loew model which was used in Topps model to estimate the soil moisture for bare soils. The soil moisture was estimated only for bare soils because the C band data has limited penetration capability. The estimated soil moisture was the correlated with polarisation (HH and HV), backscattering coefficients and dielectric constants. The results show that HH polarisation images have better correlation with backscattering coefficients and dielectric constants. Further, the estimation of soil moisture between wet and dry periods confirms that there is a strong positive correlation between volumetric soil moisture and dielectric constant.

Author Name: J. Mehanaz Fathima, K. Balasubramani, K. Kumaraswamy

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Keywords: Soil Moisture RISAT-1 Topps Model Backscatter Dielectric Constant

ISSN: 2249-3921

EISSN: 2249-4316

EOI/DOI:

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