Estimation of microwave parameters of crops from radiometric measurements

A simple approach is developed to calculate the microwave characteristics of a crop canopy. The approach is based on passive microwave measurements which are acquired for at least two levels of the vegetation, during the crop development. The method is applied to estimate the optical depth and the single scattering albedo of wheat fields at C-band, from two data sets. The results are analysed for several configurations of the measurement system in terms of polarization and view angle. Application of this simple approach appears to be very useful to investigate the effect of the vegetation structure on the canopy microwave emission.