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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #343083
Research Project: Improving Agroecosystem Services by Measuring, Modeling, and Assessing Conservation Practices

Location: Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory

Title: Vegetation water content of crops and woodlands for improving soil moisture retrievals from Coriolis WindSat

Author
item Hunt Jr, Earle
item Friedman, Jennifer
item Cosh, Michael
item LI, L. - Naval Research Laboratory
item GAISER, P. - Naval Research Laboratory
item TWAROG, E. - National Center For Agriculture And Forestry Technologies (CENTA)

Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/7/2017
Publication Date: 8/2/2017
Citation: Hunt Jr, E.R., Friedman, J.M., Cosh, M.H., Li, L., Gaiser, P., Twarog, E. 2017. Vegetation water content of crops and woodlands for improving soil moisture retrievals from Coriolis WindSat. Meeting Abstract. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8047025.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Estimation of vegetation water content (VWC) by shortwave infrared remote sensing improves soil moisture retrievals. The largest unknown for predicting VWC is stem water content; for woodlands, stem water content is expected to be proportional to stem height. Airborne imagery were acquired and photogrammetric structure-from-motion point clouds were used to estimate heights for mixed conifer and deciduous hardwood woodlands in eastern Maryland. The calculated stand heights were only weakly correlated with measured data. The normalized difference infrared index (NDII) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from both Landsat 8 Operational Line Imager and WorldView 3 were used to estimate canopy water contents. There were no relationships between canopy water contents and spectral indices, which suggested an allometric approach may not be feasible for woodlands. However, for crops, VWC was linearly correlated with canopy water contents, and provides an approach for remote sensing of VWC.