Assessing the Potential of Fully-Polarimetric Simultaneous Mono- and Bistatic Airborne SAR Acquisitions in L-Band for Applications in Agriculture and Hydrology

Abstract

Theoretical studies have shown that the use of simultaneous mono- and bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data could be beneficial to agriculture and soil moisture monitoring. This study makes use of extensive ground-truth measurements and synchronous high-resolution fully-polarimetric mono- and bistatic airborne SAR data in L-band to assess and compare the sensitivity of mono- and multistatic systems to maize crop variables, soil moisture, and surface roughness. Its results suggest that bistatic data, even with a very small bistatic angle, provide valuable additional information for maize crop biophysical parameter retrieval. However, this does not appear to be the case for soil moisture retrieval over bare soils.