Slope-corrected vegetation-corrected polarimetric two-scale model for soil moisture retrieval

We present a method able to retrieve the soil moisture content and the surface roughness of a moderately vegetated soil in a possibly hilly area, from a fully polarimetric SAR dataset. The estimation procedure is based on the prediction of the second order statistics of the scattered field provided by the Slope-Corrected Polarimetric Two-Scale Model combined with a two-component scattering model. The performance of the estimation method is assessed by comparing obtained retrieval results to “in situ” measurements. To this aim, data from AGRISAR 2006 campaign are employed.