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Soil Moisture Monitoring with Dual-Incidence-Angle RISAT-1 Data: A Pilot Study from Vidarbha Region

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Abstract

Soil moisture is a crucial parameter in the estimation of crop yield, drought forecast, hydrological and climatic studies. Soil moisture retrieval from synthetic aperture radar data is yet to be operational due to difficulty in removing the influence of vegetation and roughness in the backscattering signal. This limitation is addressed in this study by a combination of lower and higher incidence angle RISAT-1 SAR data. Roughness was derived using a linear model prepared by correlating σ°high HH–σ°low HH with root mean square height of the ground roughness component. A new attempt is made to remove the influence of vegetation using a model prepared by integrating the radar vegetation index and normalized differential vegetation index. The derived soil moisture was validated with the ground-truth data with the R2 value of 0.62 and with the error of 5.4% (volumetrically).

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Acknowledgements

This work was performed under RISAT Utilization Project funded by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The authors thank Dr. Milind R Wadodkar, Dr. S. N. Das, Dr. M. S. S. Nagaraju, Dr. M. V. Venugopal, Dr. Prashant Rajankar, Dr. Pankaj Laghate, Mr. M. Sivaprasad Reddy, Dr. Sudipta chattaraj and Dr. A. K. Joshi for their help in soil sample collection and analysis and their valuable advice in the field. Authors acknowledge Dr. M. R. Wadodkar, D. S. Mohekar—NBSS, Nitin Tendulkar, CICR, RRSC/NRSC, Ramteke, S. Verma-MRSAC, S. R. Potpite, J. P. Suman and Arun Kumar Rajwar—SLUSI for their help in soil sample analysis, ground-truth collection and process. The authors would like to thank the Director NRSC and Director NGRI for their support in the work.

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  1. CSIR-National Geophysical Research Institute, Uppal Road, Hyderabad, India

    Dinesh Kumar Sahadevan & Anand Kumar Pandey

  2. National Remote Sensing Centre/ISRO, Balanagar, Hyderabad, India

    Sitiraju Srinivasa Rao

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  1. Dinesh Kumar Sahadevan
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Correspondence to Dinesh Kumar Sahadevan.

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Sahadevan, D.K., Rao, S.S. & Pandey, A.K. Soil Moisture Monitoring with Dual-Incidence-Angle RISAT-1 Data: A Pilot Study from Vidarbha Region. J Indian Soc Remote Sens 47, 1497–1506 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12524-019-00998-4

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