Soil Moisture Inversion Method for High Gravel Surface Based on Polsar data

The natural surface soil is often mixed with a lot of sand and gravel. In this paper, a new soil moisture inversion method for gravel areas from polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) data is proposed. First, the backscattering of gravel areas is divided into two parts: surface scattering and volume scattering, which are obtained by the polarimetric decomposition method. For the volume scattering part, the Dense Medium Radiative Transfer (DMRT) model is used to obtain the soil moisture, and the Advanced Integral Equation Model (AIEM) and the Oh model are used for the surface scattering part. Finally, the weighted sum of the inversion results of the two parts is taken as the final inversion result. The accuracy of the proposed method was evaluated by field soil moisture data from Wuhai city, Inner Mongolia and ALOS-2 PolSAR data.