Abstract
Soil moisture is a highly variable component of the Earth's water balance and plays a critical role in agriculture and hydrometeorology. Its characterisation over large regions continues to receive a lot of attention, and the potential of active microwave remote sensing by synthetic aperture radar (SAH) instruments has been the focus of many efforts to tackle this challenging task. Despite recent progress, measuring surface soil moisture by SAR remains a problem due to complicating effects of vegetation and micro-topography. Multitemporal analysis provides an alternative to direct measurement, more suited to monitoring temporal changes or elucidating spatial patterns in soil moisture. A multitemporal analysis based on the principal components transformation has been applied to a winter-time sequence of ERS SAR images of a catchment in Belgium. The principal components contain information consistent with soil moisture behaviour expected from the runoff and drainage response of a basin to rainfall events.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 23-27 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Earth Observation Quarterly |
| Issue number | 56 |
| State | Published - 1997 |
| Externally published | Yes |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Ocean Engineering
- General Energy
- Atmospheric Science