Monitoring sunflower crop development from C-band radar observations
Résumé
The objective of this work was to analyse the potential of C-band radar data for monitoring summer crop characteristics during the whole vegetation cycle. Radar observations were acquired over summer crops (sunflower, corn) during the Alpilles-ReScDA experiment by the airborne ERASME and spaceborne SAR on board ERS-2 instruments. In this study, a semi-empirical approach was used to model the time variations in the sunflower radar backscattering as measured by both sensors. Then, we investigated the possibility of using a simple retrieval approach to monitor the crop growth from the combined airborne and spaceborne active microwave data. The results of this analysis are important to assess more efficiently the potential use of current spaceborne radar instruments for applications in agriculture.