Semi-Empirical Approach and Radar Polarimetry for Vegetation Observation

Assessment of soil and vegetation properties is one of the main objectives of radar remote-sensing applications. The parameters of soil dielectric constant, crop height and extinction coefficient etc are very important for planning of earth resource utilization and the prediction of environmental changes. Although, a lot of work has been already done in this direction, no robust operational methodologies for estimating these parameters have been developed. In this paper an approach based on dual incidence angle and polarimetric data is proposed to assess crop parameters as well as crop covered ground parameters without any a priori knowledge of the field. The approach has been evaluated by simulated data and a good agreement has been obtained between assumed and simulated crop and crop covered parameters.