Contribution of Polarimetry and Multi-Incidence to Soil Moisture Estimation Over Agricultural Fields Based on Time Series of L-Band SAR Data

The alpha approximation method is known to be effective and simple for soil moisture retrieval from time series of synthetic aperture radar data. However, its accuracy is usually degraded by the scattering from vegetation, and it entails working with an underdetermined linear system when solving the unknown surface parameters. In this work, we study how the availability of fully polarimetric data and a diversity in incidence angles can help this method for soil moisture estimation. Results are obtained using data from the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment 2012 campaign acquired by an air-borne L-band radar system. The assessment of the performance is based on in situ measurements over agricultural fields corresponding to five different crop types: bean, soybean, canola, corn, and wheat. The validation shows that, compared with the original method, the retrieval accuracy can be improved when the polarimetric decomposition is included in the approach. The combination of polarimetric decomposition and multi-incidence observations of enriched data provides the best performance, with a decrease in the final root-mean-square error between 0.4% and 5% with respect to single-pol and single-incidence data. Compared with HH, the results obtained for VV data present a higher accuracy for the overall crop types. The most noticeable improvement is achieved for corn, soybean and wheat, demonstrating the contribution of this extension of the original approach.