TOWARDS MONITORING GROUNDWATER TABLE DEPTH IN PEATLANDS FROM SENTINEL-1 RADAR DATA

© 2018 IEEE. Groundwater table depths (WTD) control peat formation and greenhouse gas emissions from peatlands. Therefore, monitoring WTD is of great interest for restoration and climate change mitigation actions. In shallow groundwater systems such as peatlands, moisture in the topsoil is influenced by and often in hydrostatic equilibrium with WTD. Sentinel-1 provides C-band radar data with high temporal and spatial resolution. Since backscattered microwave radiation is sensitive to the soils’ dielectric permittivity of the first centimeters, radar data provides a promising tool to obtain spatial information not only on soil moisture but also on WTD. We evaluate the correlation between time series of backscatter coefficients σ 0 and WTD measured in situ at > 50 dip wells using a change detection approach. Study area is the Drömling peatland in Germany. Overall, we observe an increase in σ 0 with shallower WTD. For a few sites and time periods σ 0 also decreased during wettest conditions and related partial inundation. Preliminary results from the Drömling peatland show that temporal correlation coefficients vary strongly among sites and reach on average 0.57. Time series indicate that the σ 0 -WTD dependency partly disappears during summer.status: publishe