Empirical modeling of soil and vegetation properties from ERS-2 backscatter along a climatic gradient

The Mediterranean zone is located in a transition between regions with humid and arid climates. These climatic conditions together with the long and intensive use of the land have resulted in a complex environment. Better understanding of this environment requires detailed spatio-temporal information of vegetation and soil properties. Relatively little attention was given for radar remote sensing monitoring of vegetation in heterogeneous regions in general and in the Mediterranean basin in particular. The objective of this work is to examine the potential of radar images for volumetric soil moisture and vegetation biomass monitoring under varied topographic and climatologic conditions. For this purpose, two parametric models were applied over two calibrated ERS-2 SAR.PRI images. Analysis of the results is discussed