X-BAND SAR DATA PARAMETERS FOR SURVEYING THE PLANTING CONDITIONS OF PADDY FIELDS

Abstract

The surveys of planting crops and conditions of the paddy fields are necessary for agricaltual policies. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites can perform observations of the earth surface regardless of weather conditions and highly suitable for deciding the observation period of the paddy fields.

The purpose of the studies were to logically select the observation duration, the incident angles and polarizations of SAR data for surveying the planting conditions of the paddy fields. The fields of usual planting of rice, the direct sowing of rice and the soybean were selected for conducting the studies. These cropped fields were observed utilizing TerraSAR-X SAR satellite at the multiple observation periods, by the multiple incident angles and by the multiple polarizations. The best SAR data conditions for surveying the planting condition of paddy fields were logically selected from the multiple acquisitions of the SAR data. We used interclass distance of each number of scenes for extracting the suitable SAR condition.

The results were revealed as follows ; The image acquisition period, incidence angle and polarization were considered for selecting the most suitable the observation period of mid-May, late May and early June due to VV polarization having an incident angle of 21 degrees. Further, the usual planting of rice, direct sowing of rice and soybean were classified with higher accuracy and the map of paddy fields classification was established.