Effect of soil moisture and crop cover in remote sensing

Abstract

An investigation with moist soil covered by narrow leaf crop at different stages of growth for establishing relation with scattering/reflection coefficient for both like polarizations (i.e. HH-pol and VV-pol) has been done. There is a linear relationship between crop covered soil moisture with scattering/reflection coefficient. Using linear relationship a theoretical model was proposed. The results from the model have been compared with the observed values. In this model, scattering/reflection coefficient was taken as dependent variable and percentage soil moisture (PSM) as independent variable. Regression parameters were obtained using the regression analysis which show that the brightness temperature at X-band depends significantly on the polarization that is chosen for receiving channel. The VV-pol is more sensitive to changes in the soil moisture, whereas, the contribution of crop morphology was more dominant near nadir for HH-pol. The calculated values show that the scattering increases as the PSM increases, whereas, observed values show no significant trend worth any conclusion.