Breakthrough technologies have brought unprecedented precision to farming practices, enabling farmers to make informed decisions and be prepared for the unforeseen. For example, technology tools have been helping farmers to analyze the soil, control irrigation, determine the suitable fertilizers and monitor the crop health to ensure optimum output.
Out of all, retrieving the correct Soil Moisture (SM) is of paramount importance to maintain good crop health. However, it is a challenging job. Remote sensing technology has made it possible for farmers to map soil moisture throughout crop life. SAR data, specifically, has tremendous potential in Soil Moisture related studies.
Amnex has recently achieved a breakthrough by obtaining copyright (diary number 4608/2022-CO/SW) on Soil Moisture workflow with Sentinel-1 SAR data. It will enable users to generate SM maps every 12 days with 10 m spatial resolution. The is a new method for SM retrieval. Using Sentinel-1A dual-pol SAR data by transforming the VH and VV backscatter information, it retrieves surface SM. In addition, it minimizes the effects of contributions of crop canopy and soil surface roughness on the SM.
The copyright obtained by Amnex is a part of intellectual property rights protection, and it is an outstanding achievement that will usher in many opportunities in SAR-based crop monitoring, yield assessment, and crop health-related studies.
It is noteworthy that Soil Moisture (SM) retrieval using SAR data is an essential subject in Remote Sensing, given its diverse applications in agriculture, hydrology and other fields. It enables users to perform irrigation scheduling, drought & flood assessment by SM data analysis. Furthermore, Crop Water Availability is another crucial parameter obtained with this SM data. With this major breakthrough, Amnex has offered one more technology tool for precision farming.
