Soil moisture conditions influence practically all aspects of Army activities and are increasingly affecting its systems and operations. Regional distributions of high resolution soil moisture data will provide critical information on operational mobility, performance of landmine and UXO sensors, and meteorological conditions at the km scale. The objective of this study is to calibrate RADARSAT-2 surface soil moisture estimates with field measurements in the semi-arid Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. RADARSAT-2 was launched in December 2007 and is the first SAR sensor to offer an operational quad-polarization mode. This mode allows to generate soil moisture (and cm-scale surface roughness) maps from single data sets. Future combination of such maps into time series will lead to further accuracy enhancement through additional exploitation of soil moisture evolution constraints. We present RADARSAT-2 soil moisture maps, field soil moisture measurements, and soil moisture maps derived from optical imagery. In addition, future work is proposed that may contribute to enhanced algorithms for soil moisture mapping using RADARSAT-2.

Date Published: 4 May 2009
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7303, Detection and Sensing of Mines, Explosive Objects, and Obscured Targets XIV, 730310 (4 May 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.820046

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7303:
Detection and Sensing of Mines, Explosive Objects, and Obscured Targets XIV
Russell S. Harmon; J. Thomas Broach; John H. Holloway Jr., Editor(s)