Review of Applications of Radar Remote Sensing in Agriculture

Abstract

Active radar remote sensing technology, with its capability of acquiring all-weather data, has great potential for agricultural monitoring. This technology can penetrate vegetation cover more deeply than optical sensors and has sensitivity to the shapes, structures, and dielectric constants of vegetation scatterers. In this paper, we discuss the applications of radar remote sensing in crop identification, cropland soil moisture inversion, crop growth parameter inversion, crop phenology retrieval, agricultural disaster monitoring, and crop yield estimation. We review several specific papers focusing these fields, and then describe the results obtained using information extracted from radar scatterometers and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Extracted SAR data include characterizations of backscattering, polarimetry, interferometry, and tomography. Lastly, we summarize the problems faced by radar applications in agriculture and consider the future trend of these applications.

Keywords

• radar remote sensing
• agriculture
• backscattering characterizations
• polarimetric characterizations
• interferometric characterizations
• tomography characterizations