Application of ERS-1 wind scatterometer data to soil frost and soil moisture monitoring in boreal forest zone

The feasibility of the ERS-1 Wind Scatterometer (WS) for monitoring the boreal forest zone is investigated, concentrating on soil frost and soil moisture monitoring, The ERS-1 WS measures the target area with coarse spatial resolution (about 50 km) using three separate antenna beams and a wide angular range. The investigations are concerned with the boreal forest zone using data 1) from test areas located in Finland and 2) covering the whole northern European boreal forest zone. The seasonal behavior of WS data is studied and a semiempirical forest backscattering model-based inversion method for the retrieval of soil moisture and for soil frost monitoring from WS data is developed, The developed inversion method employs nearly simultaneous three-beam measurements and a varying incidence angle. Promising results were obtained in the monitoring of soil frost, and the retrieval of soil moisture also appears to be a feasible field of application. The applicability of the instrument for forest biomass retrieval using single images was found to be limited to long-term change detection.