Monitoring agricultural surfaces using ERS-1 multitemporal SAR data

It is among the basic principles of physical measurement that changing the conditions of measure results in improving the knowledge of the observed phenomena of interest. In remote sensing this is achieved in the case of multispectral optical data using wavelength diversity. In the the case of single band ERS-1 data the action of external factors (meteorological, phenological, land practices) have an analogous discriminant effect considering multitemporal data. Improvement of extraction of agricultural information is performed using appropriate preprocessing, standardized principal component analysis, and classification using maximum entropy based method, in order to estimate crops acreage. The experiment, conducted over the great Driffield MARS project test site (ERS-1 data from November 1992 to may 1993) shows that set aside land can be identified as early as in February, and that acreage estimation can be done in may for the most important crop types