Microwave soil moisture monitoring in the toce valley

Within the framework of the MAP project, an airborne campaign was carried out using a microwave radiometric sensor at L, C and X bands (1.4, 6 and 10 GHz). The aim of the experiment was to collect soil moisture and vegetation biomass information on different agricultural fields in the Toce valley, in order to provide reliable input to hydrological models. Due to the low homogeneity of the area, the most suitable platform for the measurements has been an helicopter, which performed both continuous measurements along the flight tracks and separate hovering over some bare and vegetated soils. As expected, the C and X bands showed a marked sensitivity to the biomass of different fields and to soil moisture in bare soils or scarcely vegetated fields, whereas only a few data were collected at L band due to strong electromagnetic interference. Ground data of soil moisture, collected by other research teams involved in the experiments, have been used for verification.