COMBINING COHERENT AND INCOHERENT CHANGE DETECTION FOR SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVAL

The objective of this study is to present an innovative scheme for the retrieval of Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) from SAR data. The approach integrates incoherent (e.g., Balenzano et al., 2021) and coherent (e.g., De Zan et al., 2014) change detection (CD) to overcome the need for external calibration, which characterizes most of the existing CD algorithms. The hybrid scheme has been assessed both on simulated and experimental data. The former mimic Sentinel-1 (S-1) observations both in intensity and phase. The latter encompass ground and S-1 observations collected over the Apulian Tavoliere site in Southern Italy (Palmisano et al., 2022). The study details the implemented method and discusses the performance and the potential for C- and L-band SAR systems.