Remote sensing of soil moisture

Abstract

Four major objectives are proposed: (1) to study the sensitivity of active and passive microwave remote sensing approaches to soil moisture variations; (2) to investigate the effect of vegetation cover on microwave backscatter and emission; (3) to test theoretical models of microwave backscatter and emission from a natural terrain against the observations obtained from SIR-B and aircraft radiometer flights; and (4) to estimate vegetation biomass with airborne visible and infrared sensors.