Monitoring of Rice-planted Areas Using Space-borne Sar Data

The authors attempted to estimate rice-planted areas using multi-temporal RADARSAT fine-mode and ERS1/SAR data in an early period of rice-planting season. The eastern part of Hiroshima City, HigashiHiroshima City, was selected as the test field, and three multi-temporal RADARSAT fine-mode images and ERS-1/SAR images, taken before and after rice-planting were used as the test data. From the first two temporal data in RADARSAT and ERS-1/SAR data sets, SAR backscatter intensity in rice-planted fields was found to decrease significantly. From the last two temporal data, SAR backscatter intensity increased significantly due to the growth of planted rice. We evaluated the actual performance for rice area estimation by RADARSAT and ERS-1/SAR data by comparing with the estimated area by SPOT data and also with the results by the statistical report.