Surface soil water content estimation based on thermal inertia and Bayesian smoothing

Soil water content plays a critical role in agro-hydrology since it regulates the rainfall partition between surface runoff and infiltration and, the energy partition between sensible and latent heat fluxes. Current thermal inertia models characterize the spatial and temporal variability of water content by assuming a sinusoidal behavior of the land surface temperature between subsequent acquisitions. Such behavior implicitly supposes clear sky during the whole interval between the thermal acquisitions; but, since this assumption is not necessarily verified even if sky is clear at the exact epoch of acquisition, , the accuracy of the model may be questioned due to spatial and temporal varia…

Eddy covariance and sap flow measurement of energy and mass exchange of woody crops in a Mediterranean environment

Evapotranspiration estimation by micrometeorological techniques through the assessment of mass and energy exchanges in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum (SPAC) is a very active research area, involving both well-known and novel measurement techniques. A crucial aspect in validating experimental results is the integration of independent measurements of mass and energy exchanges in the SPAC. To this aim, the development and validation of an integrated approach in major tree crop species, involving different independent techniques, are presented. Eddy covariance estimates of ET fluxes were compared to up-scaled sap flow measurements in olive, orange and grapevine, three important Mediterrane…

Mass and surface energy balance approaches for monitoring water stress in vineyards

Abstract Tree crops are representing one of most widespread agricultural systems in Mediterranean regions, thus contributing in a substantial way to the economy and productivity of primary sectors of the countries interested. Besides the aspects concerning their economical relevance, tree crops like vineyards, olive and orange orchards are also typical elements of the Mediterranean landscape, and their ecological role has been recently revitalised in consideration of their function as carbon sinks for the Kyoto agreement. The environmental and economical sustainability of these agricultural systems in arid and semi-arid zones has to cope with the availability and management of water resourc…

Applications of a remote sensing-based two-source energy balance algorithm for mapping surface fluxes without in situ air temperature observations

Abstract The two-source energy balance (TSEB) model uses remotely sensed maps of land–surface temperature (LST) along with local air temperature estimates at a nominal blending height to model heat and water fluxes across a landscape, partitioned between dual sources of canopy and soil. For operational implementation of TSEB, however, it is often difficult to obtain representative air temperature data that are compatible with the LST retrievals, which may themselves have residual errors due to atmospheric and emissivity corrections. To address this issue, two different strategies in applying the TSEB model without requiring local air temperature data were tested over a typical Mediterranean…

The impact of in-canopy wind profile formulations on heat flux estimation in an open orchard using the remote sensing-based two-source model

Abstract. For open orchard and vineyard canopies containing significant fractions of exposed soil (>50%), typical of Mediterranean agricultural regions, the energy balance of the vegetation elements is strongly influenced by heat exchange with the bare soil/substrate. For these agricultural systems a "two-source" approach, where radiation and turbulent exchange between the soil and canopy elements are explicitly modelled, appears to be the only suitable methodology for reliably assessing energy fluxes. In strongly clumped canopies, the effective wind speed profile inside and below the canopy layer can strongly influence the partitioning of energy fluxes between the soil and vegetation co…

Mapping evapotranspiration on vineyards: A comparison between Penman-Monteith and energy balance approaches for operational purposes

Estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) in Sicilian vineyard is an emerging issue since these agricultural systems are more and more converted from rainfed to irrigated conditions, with significant impacts on the management of the scarce water resources of the region. The choice of the most appropriate methodology for assessing water use in these systems is still an issue of debating, due to the complexity of canopy and root systems and for their high spatial fragmentation. In vineyards, quality and quantity of the final product are dependent on the controlled stress conditions to be set trough irrigation. This paper reports an application of the well-known Penman-Monteith approach, applied i…

A distributed agro-hydrological model for irrigation water demand assessment

Abstract The actual irrigation water demand in a district in Sicily (Italy) was assessed by the spatially distributed agro-hydrological model SIMODIS (SImulation and Management of On-Demand Irrigation Systems) . For each element with homogeneous crop and soil conditions, in which the considered area can be divided, the model numerically solves the one-dimensional water flow equation with vegetation parameters derived from Earth Observation data. In SIMODIS, the irrigation scheduling is set by means of two parameters: the threshold value of soil water pressure head in the root zone, h m , and the fraction of soil water deficit to be re-filled, Δ . This study investigated the possibility of i…

E.O.-based estimation of transpiration and crop water requirements for vineyards: a case study in southern Italy

An efficient use of water for irrigation is a challenging task. From an agronomical point of view, it requires establishing the optimal amount of water to be supplied, at the correct time, based on phenological phase and water stress spatial distribution. Indeed, the knowledge of the actual water stress is essential for agronomic decisions, vineyards need to be managed to maintain a moderate water stress, thus allowing to optimize berries quality and quantity. Methods for quickly quantifying where, when and in what extent, vines begin to experience water stress are beneficial. Traditional point based methodologies, such those based on Scholander pressure chamber, even if well established ar…

Coupling SAR X-band and optical data for NDVI retrieval: model calibration and validation on two test areas

Sustainability of modern agro-hydrology requires the knowledge of spatial and temporal variability of vegetation biomass to optimize management of land and water resources. Diversely from optical imaging, temporal resolution of active sensors, such as SAR, is not limited by sky cloudiness; thus, they may be combined with optical imageries to provide a more continuous monitoring of land surfaces. Several new SAR missions (e.g., ALOS-PALSAR, COSMO-SkyMed 1 and 2, TerraSAR-X, TerraSAR-X2, Sentinel 1) acquiring at X-, C- and L-bands and dual polarization capability, are characterized by a short revisit time (from 12 h to ~10 days) and high spatial resolution (<20 m). These satellites could prov…

Sensitivity analysis on the relationship between vegetation growth and multi-polarized radar data

Spatially distributed soil moisture is required for watershed applications such as drought and flood prediction, crop irrigation scheduling, etc. In particular, an accurate assessment of the spatial and temporal variation of soil moisture is necessary to improve the predictive capability of runoff models, and for improving and validating hydrological processes forecasting. In recent years, several models have been developed in order to retrieve soil moisture using RADAR data. However, these models need precise prior knowledge about surface roughness. Within this framework, the present research aims to investigate the capabilities of multi polarimetric RADAR images to overcome the use of in …

Power sensitivity analysis of multi-frequency, multi-polarized, multi-temporal SAR data for soil-vegetation system variables characterization

Abstract: The knowledge of spatial and temporal variability of soil water content and others soil-vegetation variables (leaf area index, fractional cover) assumes high importance in crop management. Where and when the cloudiness limits the use of optical and thermal remote sensing techniques, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery has proven to have several advantages (cloud penetration, day/night acquisitions and high spatial resolution). However, measured backscattering is controlled by several factors including SAR configuration (acquisition geometry, frequency and polarization), and target dielectric and geometric properties. Thus, uncertainties arise about the more suitable configurati…

Evaluating actual evapotranspiration by means of multi-platform remote sensing data: A case study in Sicily

During the last two decades, the scientific community developed detailed mathematical models for simulating land surface energy fluxes and crop evapotranspiration rates by means of an energy balance approach. These models can be applied in large areas and with a spatial distributed approach using surface brightness temperature and some ancillary data retrieved from satellite/airborne remote sensed imagery. In this paper a district scale application, in combination with multispectral satellite and airborne data has been carried out to test the potential of two different energy balance models to estimate evapotranspiration fluxes from a set of typical Mediterranean crops (wine, olive, citrus)…

Actual evapotranspiration estimation by means of airborne and satellite remote sensing data

ABSTRACT During the last the two decades, the scientific community developed detailed mathematical models for simulating land surface energy fluxes and crop evapotrans piration rates by means of a energy ba lance approach. These models can be applied in large areas and with a spatial distributed approach using surface brightness temperature and some ancillary data retrieved from satellite/airborne remote sensed imagery. In this paper a district scale application in combination with multispectral (LandaSat 7 TM data) and hyperspectral airborne MIVIS data has been carried out to test the potentialities of two different energy balance models to estimate evapotranspiration fluxes from a set of …

Coupling two radar backscattering models to assess soil roughness and surface water content at farm scale

Remote sensing techniques are useful for agro-hydrological monitoring at the farm scale because the availability of spatially and temporally distributed data improves agricultural models for irrigation and crop yield optimization under water scarcity conditions. This research focuses on the surface water content retrieval using active microwave data. Two semi-empirical models were chosen as these showed the best performances in simulating cross and co-polarized backscatter. Thus, these models were coupled to obtain reliable assessments of both soil water content and soil roughness. The use of the coupled model enables one to avoid using roughness measured in situ. Remote sensing images and …

Surface soil humidity retrieval by means of a semi-empirical coupled SAR model

In the last years, the availability of new technologies of Earth Observation encouraged researches to use integrated approaches for environmental monitoring. Even for agro-hydrological applications, remotely sensed data are available on wide areas allowing the retrieval of cost-effective and representative estimation of high spatial and temporal variability of the soil-vegetation system variables. In particular, soil water content plays an important role determining the partition of precipitation between surface runoff and infiltration and, moreover, influences the distribution of the incoming radiation between latent and sensible heat flux. As a consequence, distributed soil water content …

Fluorescence explorer (FLEX): An optimised payload to map vegetation photosynthesis from space

The FLuorescence EXplorer (FLEX) mission proposes to launch a satellite for the global monitoring of steady-state chlorophyll fluorescence in terrestrial vegetation. Fluorescence is a sensitive probe of photosynthetic function in both healthy and physiologically perturbed vegetation, and a powerful non-invasive tool to track the status, resilience, and recovery of photochemical processes and moreover provides important information on overall photosynthetic performance with implications for related carbon sequestration. The early responsiveness of fluorescence to atmospheric, soil and plant water balance, as well as to atmospheric chemistry and human intervention in land usage makes it an ob…

A semi-empirical approach for surface soil water content estimation from radar data without a-priori information on surface roughness

Abstract In this study, the spatial distribution of soil water content in an agricultural area of 30 km 2 in Southern Italy has been estimated by using high-resolution space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar data. Multi-polarised SAR images acquired during the SIR-C mission in April 1994 have been analysed by using the semi-empirical surface backscattering model derived by Oh, Y., Sarabandi K., Ulaby F.T., 1992. An empirical model and an inversion technique for radar scattering from bare soil surface. IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sensing, 30(2), 370381. A site-specific calibration procedure of the cited model has been proposed to derive soil dielectric constant values without a-priori informatio…

Estimation of actual evapotranspiration of Mediterranean perennial crops by means of remote-sensing based surface energy balance models

Abstract. Actual evapotranspiration from typical Mediterranean crops has been assessed in a Sicilian study area by using surface energy balance (SEB) and soil-water balance models. Both modelling approaches use remotely sensed data to estimate evapotranspiration fluxes in a spatially distributed way. The first approach exploits visible (VIS), near-infrared (NIR) and thermal (TIR) observations to solve the surface energy balance equation whereas the soil-water balance model uses only VIS-NIR data to detect the spatial variability of crop parameters. Considering that the study area is characterized by typical spatially sparse Mediterranean vegetation, i.e. olive, citrus and vineyards, alterna…

On the use of multi-temporal series of COSMO-SkyMed data for LANDcover classification and surface parameter retrieval over agricultural sites

The objective of this paper is to report on the activities carried out during the first year of the Italian project “Use of COSMO-SkyMed data for LANDcover classification and surface parameters retrieval over agricultural sites” (COSMOLAND), funded by the Italian Space Agency. The project intends to contribute to the COSMO-SkyMed mission objectives in the agriculture and hydrology application domains.

Enhancing TIR Image Resolution via Bayesian Smoothing for IRRISAT Irrigation Management Project

Accurate estimation of physical quantities depends on the availability of High Resolution (HR) observations of the Earth surface. However, due to the unavoidable tradeoff between spatial and time resolution, the acquisition instants of HR data hardly coincides with those required by the estimation algorithms. A possible solution consists in constructing a synthetic HR observation at a given time k by exploiting Low Resolution (LR) and HR data acquired at different instants. In this work we recast this issue as a smoothing problem, thus focusing on cases in which observations acquired both before and after time k are available. The proposed approach is validated on a region of interest for t…

Estimation of Mediterranean crops evapotranspiration by means of remote-sensing based models

Abstract. Actual evapotranspiration from typical Mediterranean crops has been assessed in a Sicilian study area by using Surface Energy Balance and Agro-Hydrological models. Both modelling approaches require remotely sensed data to estimate evapotranspiration fluxes in a spatially distributed way. The first approach exploits visible (VIS), near-infrared (NIR) and thermal (TIR) observations to solve the surface energy balance equation. To this end two different schemes have been tested: the two-sources TSEB model, where soil and vegetation components of the surface energy balance are treated separately, and the widely used one-source SEBAL model, where soil and vegetation are considered as a…

Vegetation index retrieval by coupling optical and SAR images

Monitoring spatial and temporal variability of Vegetation Indices (VIs) is important to manage land and water resources, with significant impact on the sustainability of modern agriculture Although algorithms based on optical data give accurate products, cloud cover dramatically reduces the temporal resolution of these outputs. The launch of new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellations such as COSMO-Skymed opened new opportunities to develop agro-hydrological applications. Indeed, these satellites may represent a suitable source of data for operational applications due to their high spatial and temporal resolutions (10 m in StripMap PingPong acquisition mode, best revisit time with 4 s…

On the influences of vegetation biomass on COSMO-Skymed X-band

The knowledge of spatial and temporal variability of land cover is important to manage water resources for yield forecasting, water stress prediction, irrigation water management and flood protection. Cloud cover dramatically reduces the temporal resolution of optical data thus limiting their operational use; in addition, the spatial resolution is often inadequate for applications in heterogeneous areas. On the other hand, algorithms based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) implemented to retrieve vegetation parameters are not yet fully validated. New SAR missions (COSMO-Skymed and Terrasar-X) may represent a suitable source of data for operational uses due to the high spatial and temporal r…

Investigating the Relationship between X-Band SAR Data from COSMO-SkyMed Satellite and NDVI for LAI Detection

Monitoring spatial and temporal variability of vegetation is important to manage land and water resources, with significant impact on the sustainability of modern agriculture. Cloud cover noticeably reduces the temporal resolution of retrievals based on optical data. COSMO-SkyMed (the new Italian Synthetic Aperture RADAR-SAR) opened new opportunities to develop agro-hydrological applications. Indeed, it represents a valuable source of data for operational use, due to the high spatial and temporal resolutions. Although X-band is not the most suitable to model agricultural and hydrological processes, an assessment of vegetation development can be achieved combing optical vegetation indices (V…

Estimation of the spatially distributed surface energy budget for AgriSAR 2006, part I : remote sensing model intercomparison

A number of energy balance models of variable complexity that use remotely sensed boundary conditions for producing spatially distributed maps of surface fluxes have been proposed. Validation typically involves comparing model output to flux tower observations at a handful of sites, and hence there is no way of evaluating the reliability of model output for the remaining pixels comprising a scene. To assess the uncertainty in flux estimation over a remote sensing scene requires one to conduct pixel-by-pixel comparisons of the output. The objective of this paper is to assess whether the simplifications made in a simple model lead to erroneous predictions or deviations from a more complex mod…

Time series of Cosmo-SkyMed data for landcover classification and surface parameter retrieval over agricultural sites

This paper reports on the results of an Italian project aimed at investigating the use of X-band COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) SAR data for applications in agriculture and hydrology. Existing classification and retrieval algorithms have been tailored to CSK data and time series of crop, leaf area index and soil moisture maps have been retrieved and assessed through the comparison with in situ data collected over three agricultural sites. In addition, the CSK-derived surface parameters have been integrated into crop growth and hydrologic models and the resulting improvements have been assessed. Results indicate that multi-temporal dual-polarized CSK data are very well-suited for agricultural crop class…

Mapping daily evapotranspiration at field to continental scales using geostationary and polar orbiting satellite imagery

Abstract. Thermal infrared (TIR) remote sensing of land-surface temperature (LST) provides valuable information about the sub-surface moisture status required for estimating evapotranspiration (ET) and detecting the onset and severity of drought. While empirical indices measuring anomalies in LST and vegetation amount (e.g., as quantified by the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index; NDVI) have demonstrated utility in monitoring ET and drought conditions over large areas, they may provide ambiguous results when other factors (e.g., air temperature, advection) are affecting plant functioning. A more physically based interpretation of LST and NDVI and their relationship to sub-surface moistu…

Crop and irrigation water management using high resolution remote sensing and agrohydrological models

A combined agrohydrological and remote sensing approach, called SIMODIS (Simulation and Management of On‐Demand Irrigation Systems) (D’Urso, 2001), has been used in a Sicilian test area to simulate the operation of on‐demand irrigation system. In SIMODIS the spatial distribution of crop factor, Kc, is directly calculated from canopy variables r (albedo), LAI (Leaf Area Index) and hc (crop height) derived from satellite‐based canopy spectral reflectance. Coupling these canopy variables with a specific data set of soil properties, the SIMODIS procedure was setup to simulate, in a distributed way, the water balance and, therefore, the irrigation deliveries for a set of 136 grape fields. For th…

Canopy chlorophyll content and LAI estimation from Sentine1-2: Vegetation indices and Sentine1-2 Leve1-2A automatic products comparison

The aim of this work is to analyze different methodologies for the estimation of leaf area index (LAI) and canopy chlorophyll content (CCC), using the Sentine1-2 satellite. LAI and CCC are biophysical parameters indicator of crop health state and fundamental in the productivity prediction. The purpose is to define the most optimal LAI and CCC estimation method for operational use in the monitoring of agricultural areas. Moreover, the CCC and LAI automatic products obtained directly through the Sentinel Application Platform Software (SNAP) biophysical processor and Sentine1-2 images by means of an artificial neural network (ANN) are validated. On the other hand, common vegetation indices use…

Applicazione di tecniche di Remote Sensing: stima di parametri biofisici della vegetazione e dell’evapotraspirazione effettiva

Soil water content monitoring: a verification of thermal inertia approaches on low spatial, high temporal resolutions images

Soil water content is directly connected with soil evaporation and plant transpiration processes; in particular, soil water content within the root zone, is readily available to evapotranspiration. Thus, in agricultural sciences, the assessment of the spatial distribution of soil water content could be of utmost importance in evaluating crop water requirement. In spite of limitations to applicability due to contingent cloud cover, water content of the upper part of the soil can be determined by applying the thermal inertia approach by coupling optical and thermal infrared images. The thermal inertia formulation, rigorously retrieved on bare soil, has been also verified on soils partially co…

Analysis of energy fluxes estimations over Italy using time-differencing models based on thermal remote sensing data

Large area estimations of land surface fluxes can be a useful operational tool for up-scaling local measurements and can serve as an upper-boundary condition for higher spatial resolution applications. Given hourly measurements of radiometric surface temperature from a geostationary satellite, it is possible to derive the partitioning of energy fluxes based on the influence of the evapotranspiration process on morning surface temperature rise. In this work, the Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) model and the Dual Temperature Difference (DTD) approach were applied in order to relate the sensible heat flux to time-differential remote observations of surface temperature obtained from Me…