Radar Remote Sensing of Land Surface Parameters

This chapter describes some of the advantages and limitations of radar remote sensing in the context of land cover and agriculture. In the Introduction section, a short overview is given about the interest and techniques for remote sensing in this context. The motivation to focus on radar and SAR and a brief review of the main techniques are described in order to give a synopsis of the type of information that may be extracted from these sensors. Sections “SAR Remote Sensing for Land Cover” and “SAR Remote Sensing of Vegetation” depict some of the main or more relevant applications of SAR within the context of land cover and vegetation. Due to the broad scope of this topic, the focus has been put on four big topics: soil moisture retrieval and land cover classification as examples of SAR remote sensing applications over land and forest and agriculture monitoring as examples over vegetation. Finally, an outlook is given with a summary of the current state of the art, the limitations of remote sensing sensors, and the desired requirements for the different described applications.