This study proposes an effective method to map rice crops using the Sentinel-1 SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) time series over the Camargue region, Southern France. First, the temporal behavior of the SAR backscattering coefficient over 832 plots containing different crop types was analyzed. Through this analysis, the rice cultivation was identified using metrics derived from the Gaussian profile of the VV/VH time series (3 metrics), the variance of the VV/VH time series (one metric), and the slope of the linear regression of the VH time series (one metric). Using the derived metrics, rice plots were mapped through two different approaches: decision tree and Random Forest (RF). To validate the accuracy of each approach, the classified rice map was compared to the available national data. Similar high overall accuracy was obtained using both approaches. The overall accuracy obtained using a simple decision tree reached 96.3%, whereas an overall accuracy of 96.6% was obtained using the RF classifier. The approach, therefore, provides a simple yet precise and powerful tool to map paddy rice areas.

This paper assesses the potential of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in the C and L bands to penetrate into the canopy cover of wheat, maize and grasslands. For wheat and grasslands, the sensitivity of the C and L bands to in situ surface soil moisture (SSM) was first studied according to three levels of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI < 0.4, 0.4 < NDVI < 0.7, and NDVI > 0.7). Next, the temporal evolution of the SAR signal in the C and L bands was analyzed according to SSM and the NDVI. For wheat and grasslands, the results showed that the L-band in HH polarization penetrates the canopy even when the canopy is well-developed (NDVI > 0.7), whereas the penetration of the C-band into the canopy is limited for an NDVI < 0.7. For an NDVI less than 0.7, the sensitivity of the radar signal to SSM is approximately 0.27 dB/vol.% for the L-band in HH polarization and approximately 0.12 dB/vol.% for the C-band (in both VV and VH polarizations). For highly developed wheat and grassland cover (NDVI > 0.7), the sensitivity of the L-band in HH polarization to SSM is approximately 0.19 dB/vol.%, whereas as the C-band is insensitive to SSM. For maize, only the temporal evolution of the C-band according to SSM and the NDVI was studied because the swath of SAR images in the L-band did not cover the maize plots. The results showed that the C-band in VV polarization is able to penetrate the maize canopy even when the canopy is well developed (NDVI > 0.7) due to high-order scattering along the soil-vegetation pathway that contains a soil contribution. According to results obtained in this paper, the L-band would penetrate a well-developed maize cover since the penetration depth of the L-band is greater than that of the C-band.

Mapping irrigated plots is essential for better water resource management. Today, the free and open access Sentinel-1 (S1) and Sentinel-2 (S2) data with high revisit time offers a powerful tool for irrigation mapping at plot scale. Up to date, few studies have used S1 and S2 data to provide approaches for mapping irrigated plots. This study proposes a method to map irrigated plots using S1 SAR (synthetic aperture radar) time series. First, a dense temporal series of S1 backscattering coefficients were obtained at plot scale in VV (Vertical-Vertical) and VH (Vertical-Horizontal) polarizations over a study site located in Catalonia, Spain. In order to remove the ambiguity between rainfall and irrigation events, the S1 signal obtained at plot scale was used conjointly to S1 signal obtained at a grid scale (10 km × 10 km). Later, two mathematical transformations, including the principal component analysis (PCA) and the wavelet transformation (WT), were applied to the several SAR temporal series obtained in both VV and VH polarization. Irrigated areas were then classified using the principal component (PC) dimensions and the WT coefficients in two different random forest (RF) classifiers. Another classification approach using one dimensional convolutional neural network (CNN) was also performed on the obtained S1 temporal series. The results derived from the RF classifiers with S1 data show high overall accuracy using the PC values (90.7%) and the WT coefficients (89.1%). By applying the CNN approach on SAR data, a significant overall accuracy of 94.1% was obtained. The potential of optical images to map irrigated areas by the mean of a normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) temporal series was also tested in this study in both the RF and the CNN approaches. The overall accuracy obtained using the NDVI in RF classifier reached 89.5% while that in the CNN reached 91.6%. The combined use of optical and radar data slightly enhanced the classification in the RF classifier but did not significantly change the accuracy obtained in the CNN approach using S1 data.

In the context of monitoring and assessment of water consumption in the agricultural sector, the objective of this study is to build an operational approach capable of detecting irrigation events at plot scale in a near real-time scenario using Sentinel-1 (S1) data. The proposed approach is a decision tree-based method relying on the change detection in the S1 backscattering coefficients at plot scale. First, the behavior of the S1 backscattering coefficients following irrigation events has been analyzed at plot scale over three study sites located in Montpellier (southeast France), Tarbes (southwest France), and Catalonia (northeast Spain). To eliminate the uncertainty between rainfall and irrigation, the S1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signal and the soil moisture estimations at grid scale (10 km × 10 km) have been used. Then, a tree-like approach has been constructed to detect irrigation events at each S1 date considering additional filters to reduce ambiguities due to vegetation development linked to the growth cycle of different crops types as well as the soil surface roughness. To enhance the detection of irrigation events, a filter using the normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) obtained from Sentinel-2 optical images has been proposed. Over the three study sites, the proposed method was applied on all possible S1 acquisitions in ascending and descending modes. The results show that 84.8% of the irrigation events occurring over agricultural plots in Montpellier have been correctly detected using the proposed method. Over the Catalonian site, the use of the ascending and descending SAR acquisition modes shows that 90.2% of the non-irrigated plots encountered no detected irrigation events whereas 72.4% of the irrigated plots had one and more detected irrigation events. Results over Catalonia also show that the proposed method allows the discrimination between irrigated and non-irrigated plots with an overall accuracy of 85.9%. In Tarbes, the analysis shows that irrigation events could still be detected even in the presence of abundant rainfall events during the summer season where two and more irrigation events have been detected for 90% of the irrigated plots. The novelty of the proposed method resides in building an effective unsupervised tool for near real-time detection of irrigation events at plot scale independent of the studied geographical context.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the potential of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar “SAR” data (C-band) for monitoring agricultural frozen soils. First, investigations were conducted from simulated radar signal data using a SAR backscattering model combined with a dielectric mixing model. Then, Sentinel-1 images acquired at a study site near Paris, France were analyzed using temperature data to investigate the potential of the new Sentinel-1 SAR sensor for frozen soil mapping. The results show that the SAR backscattering coefficient decreases when the soil temperature drops below 0 °C. This decrease in signal is the most important for temperatures that ranges between 0 and −5 °C. A difference of at least 2 dB is observed between unfrozen soils and frozen soils. This difference increases under freezing condition when the temperature at the image acquisition date decreases. In addition, results show that the potential of the C-band radar signal for the discrimination of frozen soils slightly decreases when the soil moisture decreases (simulated data were used with soil moisture contents of 20 and 30 vol%). The difference between the backscattering coefficient of unfrozen soil and the backscattering coefficient of frozen soil decreases by approximately 1 dB when the soil moisture decreases from 30 to 20 vol%). Finally, the results show that both VV and VH allow a good detection of frozen soils but the sensitivity of VH is higher by approximately 1.5 dB. In conclusion, this study shows that the difference between a reference image acquired without freezing and an image acquired under freezing conditions is a good tool for detecting frozen soils.

This paper presents a comparison between the Sentinel-1/Sentinel-2-derived soil moisture product at plot scale (S ² MP) and the new Copernicus surface soil moisture (C-SSM) product at 1-km scale over a wide region in southern France. In this study, both products were first evaluated using in situ measurements obtained by the calibrated time delay reflectometer in field campaigns. The accuracy against the in situ measurements was defined by the correlation coefficient R, the root mean square difference (RMSD), and the bias and the unbiased root mean square difference (ubRMSD). Then, the soil moisture estimations from both SSM products were intercompared over one year (October 2016-October 2017). Both products show generally good agreement with in situ measurements. The results show that using in situ measurements collected over agricultural areas and grasslands, the accuracy of the C-SSM is good (RMSD = 6.0 vol%, ubRMSD = 6.0 vol%, and R = 0.48) but less accurate than the S ² MP (RMSD = 4.0 vol%, ubRMSD = 3.9 vol%, and R = 0.77). The intercomparison between the two SSM products over one year shows that both products are highly correlated over agricultural areas that are mainly used for cereals (R value between 0.5 and 0.9 and RMSE between 4 and 6 vol%). Over areas containing forests and vineyards, the C-SSM values tend to overestimate the S ² MP values (bias > 5 vol%). In the case of well-developed vegetation cover, the S ² MP does not provide SSM estimations while C-SSM sometimes provides underestimated SSM values.