Study of empirical approaches for retrieval of soil moisture in solani river catchment area of Uttarakand, India

Empirical approaches are very much site specific and their applicability should be tested before applying to any other data and region. Therefore, in this paper we have studied the applicability of two different empirical approaches of soil moisture retrieval with PALSAR data for Solani river catchment area of Roorkee, Uttarakhand. These two approaches are Dubois model and Oh model. Sensitivity of Oh and Dubois model was observed for change in soil dielectric and surface roughness. Further, inversion technique was developed so that soil moisture can be retrieved with PALSAR data without having a priori information of soil surface roughness. A comparison of both the models for their effectiveness of soil moisture retrieval in Solani river catchment has also been carried.