Backscattering characteristics Analyses of winter wheat covered area and Drought Monitoring Based on active microwave

Abstract:

The advantage of active microwave remote sensing on the sensitivity of polarization characteristic, backscatter intensity and phase characteristics to soil moisture demonstrates its potential to map and monitor relative soil moisture changes and drought information with high spatial resolution. However, the existence of soil surface condition and vegetation effects confounds the retrieval of soil moisture from active microwave, and therefore limits its applications on soil moisture retrieval and drought monitoring. To research how to reduce the effect of soil roughness and wheat cover with multi- incident angles and multi polarization active microwave remote sensing data, MIMICS and AIEM models were used to simulate the backscattering coefficient of winter wheat covered field. The interaction between winter wheat at main growth stages and microwave was analyzed. The effects of surface roughness and physical parameters of wheat on the backscattering characteristics and the variation of different incident angles and different polarization conditions are simulated and analyzed emphatically. Then scattering coefficient information of winter wheat covered area at different wheat growth stage was measured with a C band ground-based scattering meter. At the same time, biomass, leaf area index and soil rough degree, soil water content and other related parameters are collected. After comparing and analyzing the measured data and the simulated data at different incident angles and different polarization modes, we propose an approach of using multi polarization and multi angle data to eliminate the soil roughness and wheat vegetation effects and performing the inversion of soil moisture. Using the Radarsat2 satellite SAR data and ground-based scatter data gotten at the same period in 2012, soil moisture information of greater area is obtained, and then the drought information is obtained, which is consistent with the measured results.