Facility for continuous agricultural field monitoring with a GB-PolSAR

Current climate and weather changes urged the scientific community to find ways to observe and understand the relatively rapid land-atmosphere processes related to the water cycle. The HydroSoil project, funded by the European Space Agency, was proposed to experimentally assess the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar in future short revisit time missions based on Geosynchronous Orbital platforms. This article describes the HydroSoil facility providing continuous monitoring of an agricultural field with a 10-min temporal resolution and a spatial resolution in the order of 1 m2. Gathered data from the full Pol Ground-Based SAR are being used to investigate the capability of Geosynchronous SAR missions to retrieve soil moisture and to measure vegetation parameters. To achieve the project's objectives, intensive procurement of ground truth data encompassing continuous acquisition of relevant meteorological parameters such as air humidity, temperature, precipitation wind speed and direction, pressure, and solar irradiation together with other vegetation characteristics under study has been mandatory. The different densities, sizes, and water content of two different crops, barley and corn, together with the data generated, will enable the assessment of the missions’ ability to extract essential scene characteristics, such as soil moisture and crop water content, for use in future geostationary missions.

This work was supported in part by the European Space Agency (ESA Contract 4000132509/20/NL/FF/ab with UPC), and in part by the Spanish MCINN funds Unidad de Excelencia Maria de Maeztu under Grant MDM2016-0600, Project PID2020-117303GB-C21/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and Project PID2020-117303GB-C22/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (published version)