Sensor and ground measurements can be considered as different representation of soil moisture characteristics. Sensor measurements, i.e. radar acquisitions, are synoptic and can cover wide areas but are influenced by other parameters such as roughness and vegetation. On the other side ground measurements are more related to soil moisture but because of the large variability of soil moisture often require some interpolation techniques to be later compared to satellite data. This paper presents an approach denominated Group Inversion Approach which aims at detecting the stable soil moisture characteristics starting from all kind of measurements available. Being reliable these points can be subsequently used to infer information about the mean soil moisture content over an area, such as a whole watershed. The soil moisture estimated from different inversion approaches are compared among them and with the ground data in relation with field characteristics. In this preliminary analysis the field characteristics have been extracted by the SAR images considering their semi-variograms. The preliminary results indicate that those fields with lowest inversion errors individuate mean field soil moisture values in good agreement with mean watershed soil moisture values.

Date Published: 10 October 2008
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 7109, Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XIV, 71091C (10 October 2008);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7109:
Image and Signal Processing for Remote Sensing XIV
Lorenzo Bruzzone; Claudia Notarnicola; Francesco Posa, Editor(s)