PREDICTION OF SOME SOIL WATER CONTENT PARAMETERS USING REMOTE SENSING & GIS TECHNIQUES

Water content of the surface horizon & root zone is a main key for any agriculture, hydrological & environmental issues, for this reason, big concern has been dell with statues & amount of soil water by many different ways, which remote sensing technique is one of it. To know the possibility of using remote sensing to investigate soil water parameters, relationships between remote sensing data taken by landsat satellite (ETM+) and some soil water content parameters has been studied for ten soil units selected from north Kut project located at the left of Tigris river, which showed different soil status. The aim of this study was to build statistical models to predict some soil water content parameters using Remote Sensing & GIS techniques. The results showed that there were significant relationships between remote sensing data and the field data of each of available water "as volume theta v & mass theta m percentage", water saturation percentage theta s and field soil moisture for the surface horizons of the tested sites with coefficient of determination (R2) values: 0.986; 0.989; 1.000 and 0.962 respectively. Fittings (R2) values for predicted and tested parameters were: 0.923; 0.889; 0.998; and 0.946 respectively which revealed that it is possible to use remote sensing data to predict soil water content parameters because of the direct effect of soil water on electromagnetic energy reflection from soil surface. Its a good chance to produce digital soil water content maps with high coverage area that can use in the geospatial software's to predict and build many water relations for the soil - plant - atmosphere continuum.