In recent years, a large number of salterns have been converted into rice fields in the coastal region of Jiangsu Province, Eastern China. The high spatial heterogeneity of soil salinity has caused large within-field variabilities in grain yield of rice. The identification of low-yield areas within a field is an important initial step for precision farming. While optical satellite remote sensing can provide valuable information on crop growth and yield potential, the availability of cloud-free optical image data is often hampered by unfavorable weather conditions. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) offers an alternative due to its nearly day-and-night and all-weather capability in data acquisition. Given the free data access of the Sentinels, this study aimed at developing a Sentinel-1A-based SAR index for rice yield estimation. The proposed SAR simple difference (SSD) index uses the change of the Sentinel-1A backscatter in vertical-horizontal (VH) polarization between the end of the tillering stage and the end of grain filling stage (SSDVH). A strong exponential relationship has been identified between the SSDVH and rice yield, producing accurate yield estimation with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.74 t ha-1 and a relative error (RE) of 7.93%.
CITATION STYLE
Wang, J., Dai, Q., Shang, J., Jin, X., Sun, Q., Zhou, G., & Dai, Q. (2019). Field-scale rice yield estimation using sentinel-1A synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data in coastal saline region of Jiangsu Province, China. Remote Sensing, 11(19). https://doi.org/10.3390/rs11192274
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