Zhurnal Radioelektroniki - Journal of Radio Electronics. eISSN 1684-1719. 2022. №12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.30898/1684-1719.2022.12.5

 

Broadband Reflectometric Method

for the measuring of soil surface moisture and roughness

 

K.V. Muzalevskiy

 

Kirensky Institute of Physics, Federal Research Center KSC Siberian Branch Russian Academy of Sciences

 

The paper was received November 3, 2022

 

Abstract. In this article, a numerical-analytical model of the reflection coefficient of an electromagnetic wave from a rough soil surface is proposed. Based on the created model of reflection coefficient, in the frequency range from 520 MHz to 1.26 GHz, a broadband method for the root-mean-square deviation (RMS) of heights and volumetric moisture of rough soil surface is developed. When the model of reflection coefficient creating, the field of reflected wave from the rough soil surface was presented as the sum of secondary fields from an infinite set of elementary horizontal scattering plates (with a given average size). The field from each elementary scattering plate is represented as an average field from the result of stochastic interference of an infinite set of coherent elementary sources of secondary waves. The vertical position of the elementary sources is determined by the stochastic height of the soil surface within elementary plate. It is shown that the created model describes the total value of reflection coefficient (coherent and diffuse components) with the determination coefficient of R2=0.981 and root-mean square error (RMSE) no more than 0.35 dB, relative to the reflection coefficient, calculated by the finite difference method and the advanced integral equations method. The possibility of RMS heights and volumetric moisture of rough soil surface retrieval, relative to the true values, was shown no worse than R2=0.909 (RMSE=0.4 cm) and R2=0.975 (RMSE=2%), respectively. This analysis was carried out on the example of 16 soil samples, the complex permittivity of which was measured for a wide range of dry bulk densities from 0.7 g/cm3 to 1.8 g/cm3, moisture content, texture with variation clay content from 0% to 76% and organic matter content from 0.6% to 6.9%. The results have a wide application value both for single-frequency and multi-frequency radar and radiometric methods of soil moisture measuring.

Key words: remote sensing, radiolocation, radiometry, reflectometry, reflection coefficient, emissivity, rough surface, soils, complex permittivity of soils, remote sensing of soil moisture.

Financing: The work was supported within the framework of the Russian Science Foundation and the Krasnoyarsk Regional Science Foundation grant No. 22-17-20042

Corresponding author: Muzalevskiy Konstantin, rsdkm@ksc.krasn.ru

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For citation:

Muzalevskiy K.V. Broadband reflectometric method for the measuring of soil surface moisture and roughness. Zhurnal radioelektroniki [Journal of Radio Electronics] [online]. 2022. №12. https://doi.org/10.30898/1684-1719.2022.12.5 (In Russian).