Estimation of soil moisture using a vegetation scattering model in wheat fields

We develop a vegetation scattering model to eliminate the effect of vegetation and surface roughness on the radar signal. The canopy water content is an important variable associated with the scattering effect of vegetation, and it can be calculated using the leaf area index, which is retrieved from PROSAILH optical model based on Landsat-8 images. The scattering model introduced the direct scattering contribution of underlying ground into the water cloud model. The experimental correlation length was replaced by a fitting parameter from C-band RADSARSAT-2 radar data to calculate the scattering contribution of underlying ground. Results demonstrate that the vegetation scattering model has a good performance in soil moisture retrieval with R-2 of 0.805 and root-mean-square error of 0.039 m(3).m(-3). The applicability and capability of the scattering model will provide the operational potential of C-band radar data for soil moisture retrieval in an agricultural region. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License.