Optimal configurations of bistatic radar for retrieving soil moisture and vegetation biomass

The possible contribution of bistatic radar measurements to estimate bare soil moisture and vegetation biomass is investigated by a simulation study based on well established electromagnetic models (both coherent and incoherent components). The best system configuration, in terms of observation directions, polarisations and frequency has been singled out by predicting the retrieval accuracy. This has been evaluated using the Cramer-Rao lower bound to identify optimal configurations for single polarisation and multipolarisation receivers, as well as in case the bistatic measurements are complemented by monostatic ones.