Decomposing Dual Scale Soil Surface Roughness for Microwave Remote Sensing Applications

Marzahn, Philip; Seidel, Moritz and Ludwig, Ralf (6. July 2012): Decomposing Dual Scale Soil Surface Roughness for Microwave Remote Sensing Applications. In: Remote Sensing, Vol. 4, No. 7: pp. 2016-2032

Abstract

Soil surface roughness, as investigated in this study, is decomposed in a dual scale process. Therefore, we investigated photogrammetrically acquired roughness information over different agricultural fields in the size of 6-22 m(2) and decomposed them into a dual scale process by using geostatistical techniques. For the characterization of soil surface roughness, we calculated two different roughness indices (the RMS height s and the autocorrelation length l) differing significantly for each scale. While we could relate the small scale roughness pattern clearly to the seedbed rows, the larger second scale pattern could be related to the appearance of wheel tracks of the tillage machine used. As a result, major progress was made in the understanding of the different scales in soil surface roughness characterization and its quantification possibilities.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Form of publication: Publisher's Version
• Keywords: soil surface roughness; photogrammetry; SAR; synthetic aperture radar; detrending; RMS height; autocorrelation
• Faculties: Geosciences > Department of Geography > Physical Geography and Remote Sensing
• Subjects: 500 Science > 550 Earth sciences and geology
• ISSN: 2072-4292
• Place of Publication: POSTFACH, CH-4005 BASEL, SWITZERLAND
• Language: English