On the Use of Native Resolution Backscatter Intensity Data for Optimal Soil Moisture Retrieval
The accuracy of soil moisture estimated from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter data at high resolutions is limited by speckle. A common practice to mitigate speckle is to multilook the data prior to retrieving soil moisture. While multilooking indeed reduces speckle, it also decreases the spatial resolution and removes possibly useful high resolution information from the data. We, therefore, hypothesized that using higher resolution backscatter data for soil moisture retrieval would lead to higher retrieval accuracies. A high resolution field study combined with a synthetic experiment showed that calculating soil moisture prior to multilooking to the final target resolution calculate-then-average (CtA) has substantial advantages over the average-then-calculate (AtC) approach. Currently, the AtC strategy is most often applied in soil moisture studies, mainly due to its computational advantage compared to the CtA approach. We show that by making use of a higher source resolution backscatter data than the target resolution, we could improve soil moisture retrieval over an agricultural field.
| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article/Letter to editor biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | High resolution, soil moisture, synthetic experiment, |
| Online Access: | https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/on-the-use-of-native-resolution-backscatter-intensity-data-for-op |
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