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Fundamentals of Remote Sensing |
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5.5.2 Soil MoistureBackground Why remote sensing? Remote sensing offers a means of measuring soil moisture across a wide area instead of at discrete point locations that are inherent with ground measurements. RADAR is effective for obtaining qualitative imagery and quantitative measurements, because radar backscatter response is affected by soil moisture, in addition to topography, surface roughness and amount and type of vegetative cover. Keeping the latter elements static, multitemporal radar images can show the change in soil moisture over time. The radar is actually sensitive to the soil's dielectric constant, a property that changes in response to the amount of water in the soil. Users of soil moisture information from remotely sensed data include agricultural marketing and administrative boards, commodity brokers, large scale farming managers, conservation authorities, and hydroelectric power producers. Data requirements Canada vs. International Case Study (example)
As with most Canadian prairie provinces, the topography of Saskatchewan is quite flat. The region is dominated by black and brown chernozemic soil characterized by a thick dark organic horizon, ideal for growing cereal crops such as wheat. More recently, canola has been introduced as an alternative to cereal crops. Shown here is a radar image acquired July 7, 1992 by the European Space Agency (ESA) ERS-1 satellite. This synoptic image of an area near Melfort, Saskatchewan details the effects of a localized precipitation event on the microwave backscatter recorded by the sensor. Areas where precipitation has recently occurred can be seen as a bright tone (bottom half) and those areas unaffected by the event generally appear darker (upper half). This is a result of the complex dielectric constant which is a measure of the electrical properties of surface materials. The dielectric property of a material influences its ability to absorb microwave energy, and therefore critically affects the scattering of microwave energy. The magnitude of the radar backscatter is proportional to the dielectric constant of the surface. For dry, naturally occurring materials, this is in the range of 3 - 8 , and may reach values as high as 80 for wet surfaces. Therefore the amount of moisture in the surface material directly affects the amount of backscattering. For example, the lower the dielectric constant, the more incident energy is absorbed, the darker the object will be on the image. |
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