Estimation of Surface Soil Moisture Using Modified Oh Model and Dual-Polarimetric Sentinel-1 SAR Data

Severa1 semi-empirical models are proposed to retrieve soil moisture from Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) data. Inversion of these models to retrieve soil moisture varied largely with different field conditions that includes crop coverage, nature of crops as well as roughness of the field. Therefore, considerable confusion is common when using these approaches to retrieve soil moisture in different field situations. In this study, we tried to modify the input parameter of the Oh model to improve its ability to retrieve soil moisture in a heterogenous field situation by removing the vegetation influence. Using the dual-pol SAR data from Sentinel-l we decompose the scattering matrix to modify the Oh model for better soil moisture retrieval in the Kharagpur region of India.