Soil moisture assessment at a basin scale using active microwave remote sensing: the Agriscatt '88 Airborne Campaign on the Orgeval watershed

In June and July 1988, the European Space Agency organized in five European countries the Agriscatt '88 campaign. For this campaign two airborne scatterometers were used, including the French dual-frequency (C and X band) dual-polarization (HH and W) forward-looking radar ERASME. For the French site, the Orgeval hydrological basin, one of the aims of the experiment was to develop a soil moisture retrieval algorithm from radar data. It is shown, from comparison with the ground-truth data, that the use of a multiconfiguration radar improves the capacity of imaging radar for soil moisture mapping. In particular, an algorithm based on a vegetation absorption index and a soil moisture one is tested over wheat fields.