Sentinel-1 SAR interferometry for agriculture: description of an experiment in Oryol, Russia

In this work we describe an experiment to be carried out in the basin of Suhaya Orlitsa river (Oryol region, central part of European Russia) to compare in-situ measurements of soil moisture with estimates obtained using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry. The Sentinel-1 mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), acquiring C-band SAR images regularly over all Earth regions since 2014 with a mean revisiting time of 6 days, is used. In-situ measurements of soil moisture are planned in a time interval of 3 hours in coincidence of each Sentinel-1 passage, using a temporal sampling of 15 minutes. Test measurements are planned at the end of the month of April, when the soil accumulates water. The aim of the experiment is to demonstrate the feasibility of using Sentinel-1 images to densify the network of in-situ measurements of soil moisture on the territory of Russia. The application of SAR interferometry is investigated as it requires less in-situ measurements than methods based on the use of radar cross-section and the inversion of models of electromagnetic scattering from natural surfaces. Examples of interferometric coherence and phase images obtained by processing Sentinel-1 images acquired on 20th September 2019 and 2nd October 2019 over the study area are shown.