Soil moisture retrieval in moderately vegetated areas via a Polarimetric Two-Scale Model

In this paper we introduce an algorithm to retrieve the soil moisture content and the surface roughness of a moderately vegetated soil from a fully polarimetric SAR dataset. The estimation procedure is founded on the prediction of the second order statistics of the scattered field provided by the Polarimetric Two-Scale Model combined with a two-component scattering model. The performance of the estimation algorithm is assessed by comparing obtained retrieval results to “in situ” measurements. To this aim, data from Little Washita SMEX´03 campaign available in literature are employed.