Spatial organization of hydrological processes in small catchments derived from advanced SAR image processing: Field work and preliminary results

Abstract

The presented research focusses on the use of active microwave observations to retrieve hydrologically relevant information of surface characteristics (i.e. soil moisture and surface roughness) in river catchments. Given the availability of pairs of SAR data from the tandem mission the following research issues are addressed: (1) development and testing of improved retrieval algorithms for surface characteristics based on the combined use of phase and magnitude information of the return signal from active microwave sensors; (2) use of high resolution field collected data and remotely sensed data to test and validate theories for the catchment scale estimation of soil moisture integrated over..