Assessment of Agricultural Crop Conditions Using NASA UAVSAR Datasets

Aaron Davitt, CUNY Graduate Center, adavitt@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Kyle McDonald, The City College of New York, kmcdonald2@ccny.cuny.edu (Presenter)
Marzieh Azarderakhsh, Fairleigh Dickinson University, mazarderakhsh@gc.cuny.edu
Vanessa Marie Escobar, NASA GSFC / SSAI, vanessa.escobar@nasa.gov
Johnathan Winter, Dartmouth College, jonathan.m.winter@dartmouth.edu

Over the last decade, the Central Valley of California has been in persistent drought. This has impacted the state’s water supply, where the majority of the allocation goes to the state’s highly productive agricultural sector. The high consumption of freshwater in a highly stressed, arid region has revealed the vulnerabilities of such a system. Improved water management through informed decision making based on remote sensing of crop conditions would benefit growers in drought-impacted regions. However, a thorough and robust understanding of the linkages of remote sensing-based surface parameters, e.g. soil moisture and crop health, spatially and temporally, has been lacking. We examine NASA UAVSAR (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar) data in Yolo County, California to determine its utility for informing on crop conditions. Backscatter data collected from 2010 to 2012 (encompassing wet and dry periods) are analyzed to assess the suitability of extracting soil moisture and assess crop condition from time series radar data acquired during the growing season and between years. Using such data in comparison to other remote sensing datasets (MODIS, Landsat) can potentially reveal within and between field variability that can underpin a framework for a decision support system that would help agricultural growers improve and identify key variables supporting water management practices for optimum crop health and yield.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  General Contributions   (Tue 4:35 PM)

Associated Project(s): 

• McDonald, Kyle: Vegetation Phenology Assessment Using Satellite Radar Remote Sensing: Global Monitoring of Daily and Seasonal Changes in Canopy Structure and Water Status ...details

Poster Location ID: 115