Assessment of spatial variation of soil moisture during maize growth cycle using SAR observations

Abstract

Spatial Information about Soil moisture over agricultural crops are required for efficient irrigation which in turn helps in saving water and increases crop yield. Soil moisture also useful in prediction of flooded and drought regions. However field measurement of soil moisture is not a practical approach. The main objective of the study is to track soil moisture variation all along the maize growth period in a Semi-Arid region. There are only few studies carried out on soil moisture variation considering whole maize growing period. During the crop growing period soil moisture field investigation are conducted in synchronization with Satellite pass. Sentinel-1a Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) satellite, Interferometric wide swath dual polarized data with 5.405 GHz frequency and central incidence angle of 23�?� with repeat period of 12 days was used in this study. All in all during growth period 6 satellite pass scenes are acquired and processed by standard procedure using Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP) software. An attempt was made to redeem surface soil moisture for the whole maize growing crop cycle using water cloud model. The whole period of maize crop was divided into 3 parts like seedling, growing and harvesting period and soil moisture is retrieved for each period. The estimated soil moisture was validated with 30 field measured soil moisture samplings. The correlation coefficient of retrieved and actual soil moisture of seedling, growing and harvesting periods are 0.77, 0.72 and 0.6 respectively. The output of this study will be helpful in formulating strategies for irrigation water management. � 2019 SPIE.