Analysis of Polarimetric SAR Data for Soil Moisture Retrieval

In this paper, the results obtained by applying two polarimetric SAR decompositions to a time-series of L-band radar data, in terms of scattering contributions, are compared with the simulations of the Tor Vergata electromagnetic model. The objective was to evaluate the capability of polarimetric SAR decompositions to single out those scattering mechanisms mostly correlated to soil moisture or vegetation. We performed the analysis by using L-band full-polarimetric SAOCOM-1A data acquired over an agricultural region in the Monte Buey site (Córdoba Province, Argentina) and by considering five corn fields.