1 HIGH RESOLUTION AIRBORNE SOIL MOISTURE MAPPING

Airborne remote sensing now provides a viable option for high resolution mapping of soil moisture, allowing larger areas to be covered in greater spatial and temporal detail than has hitherto been possible from traditional ground based techniques. This paper presents a demonstration of soil moisture mapping at 50m resolution with an L-band passive microwave radiometer, using data collected from the recent National Airborne Field Experiments (www.nafe.unimelb.edu.au). This intensive month-long field campaign involved regular flights across distances of up to 40km together with extensive ground validation data at specific farms. This is the first airborne remote sensing study to provide such high resolution soil moisture data. Results indicate a very good agreement of the retrieved and measured soil moisture spatial distribution, with an overall absolute retrieval error less than 5 % v/v