2000 Volume 44 Pages 265-270
The goal of this study is to estimate the surface soil moisture and surface roughness using polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. In this study, a preliminary analysis for approaching, this objective was conducted based on a sensitivity analysis of surface parameters. A numerical scattering model was used, and the results were compared using only like-polarized backscattering coefficients obtained from the data of an experiment conducted simultaneously with an airborne SAR. The surface correlation function was considered in this analysis. Because the problem is site-specific and depends upon the measurement accuracy of both the ground truth data and the SAR system including speckle noise, as well as the model uncertainty, the comparison results did not agree well with measured and inferred values of both the soil moisture and surface roughness. In particular, the moisture was underestimated and the roughness was overestimated.
