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Soil moisture conditions influence practically all aspects of Army activities and are increasingly affecting its systems and operations. Regional distributions of high resolution soil moisture data will provide critical information on operational mobility, performance of landmine and UXO sensors, and meteorological conditions at the km scale. The objective of this study is to calibrate RADARSAT-2 surface soil moisture estimates with field measurements in the semi-arid Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. RADARSAT-2 was launched in December 2007 and is the first SAR sensor to offer an operational quad-polarization mode. This mode allows to generate soil moisture (and cm-scale surface roughness) maps from single data sets. Future combination of such maps into time series will lead to further accuracy enhancement through additional exploitation of soil moisture evolution constraints. We present RADARSAT-2 soil moisture maps, field soil moisture measurements, and soil moisture maps derived from optical imagery. In addition, future work is proposed that may contribute to enhanced algorithms for soil moisture mapping using RADARSAT-2.

©2009 COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.