Soil Moisture Retrieval Using a Modified Decomposition Method and Multi-Incidence Polarimetric SAR Data

Abstract

A modified model-based polarimetric decomposition method, considering both the surface and dihedral scattering depolarization, is proposed for soil moisture retrieval. In the parameter solution, it works combining at least two polarimetric SAR images acquired simultaneously in different incidence angles. Moreover, it needs not to decide whether dihedral or surface scatter is the dominant contribution. The experiments to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach is carried out using L-band polarimetric UAVSAR multi-incidence data in Winnipeg, Canada. The scattering mechanism of forest, grass land, urban, and barren area are analyzed compared with Yamaguchi three-component decomposition results. The performance of the soil moisture estimation algorithm is also assessed by comparing the retrieval results with in situ measurements.