Assessment of soil moisture using sentinel 1A microwave data and estimating minimum quantum of water required for irrigating paddy crops

Abstract

Many research programs are increasingly creating the interest in getting the land surface conditions using several applications in the field of Hydrology Meteorology Agronomy etc with satellite data This inspiration gives an insight on utilizing geospatial technology for efficient water supply and management in agriculture As per the World Fact Book of Central Intelligence Agency United States of America only 3 of the water that is available on the surface is fresh in the world and in most of the region in India 70 of fresh water is utilized for agriculture The remaining fresh water is used for drinking other domestic consumptions and industries During the dry season the problems become worse because of water scarcity Therefore there is a pressing need for efficient management of fresh water for agricultural purpose Hence in this research work a method called as Optimal Water Utilization Prediction OWUP has been proposed to determine the optimum amount of water required for irrigation from the satellite images The primary objective of this research work is to estimate the water requirement from the soil moisture and Evapotranspiration of the agricultural field that is extracted from the microwave satellite imagery Sentinel 1A satellite data provides the combined backscattering values for soil and canopy cover of an experimental agricultural field in Maduranthagam Taluk Tamil Nadu The soil surface backscattering values of the above field are determined from the combined backscattering values using a Water Cloud Model WCM which also uses Landsat 7 ETM and Landsat 8 OLI data collected between 11th December 2016 and 01st March 2017 for extracting the required parameters newline