Regional Hydrology

Microwave Remote Sensing

Surface soil moisture is the most important factor for studying an interactoin of atmosphere and land surface. Spatial informations of soil wetness will effectively help us to understand this interaction processes.
The backscattering coefficient observed by satellite-based microwave scatterometer are influenced by surface geometric roughness and surface soil wetness. It is expected that the spatial soil moisture informations can be obtained utilizing this backscattering data.
Experiments using a C band microwave scatterometer in both indoor and outdoor were carried out to clarify the characteristics of the soil backscatter from its surface at our laboratory, and ground-base verification experiments for the soil moisture detection by spaceborne SARs (E ERS-1 and J ERS-1) were also carried out.