Reliable near-surface soil moisture (θ) information is crucial for supporting risk assessment of future water usage, particularly considering the vulnerability of agroforestry systems of Mediterranean environments to climate change. We propose a simple empirical model by integrating dual-polarimetric Sentinel-1 (S1) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) C-band single-look complex data and topographic information together with in-situ measurements of θ into a random forest (RF) regression approach (10-fold cross-validation). Firstly, we compare two RF models' estimation performances using either 43 SAR parameters (θNovSAR) or the combination of 43 SAR and 10 terrain parameters (θNovSAR+Terrain). Secondly, we analyze the essential parameters in estimating and mapping θ for S1 overpasses twice a day (at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.) in a high spatiotemporal (17 × 17 m; 6 days) resolution. The developed site-specific calibration-dependent model was tested for a short period in November 2018 in a field-scale agroforestry environment belonging to the “Alento” hydrological observatory in southern Italy. Our results show that the combined SAR + terrain model slightly outperforms the SAR-based model (θNovSAR+Terrain with 0.025 and 0.020 m3 m−3, and 89% compared to θNovSAR with 0.028 and 0.022 m3 m−3, and 86% in terms of RMSE, MAE, and R2). The higher explanatory power for θNovSAR+Terrain is assessed with time-variant SAR phase information-dependent elements of the C2 covariance and Kennaugh matrix (i.e., K1, K6, and K1S) and with local (e.g., altitude above channel network) and compound topographic attributes (e.g., wetness index). Our proposed methodological approach constitutes a simple empirical model aiming at estimating θ for rapid surveys with high accuracy. It emphasizes potentials for further improvement (e.g., higher spatiotemporal coverage of ground-truthing) by identifying differences of SAR measurements between S1 overpasses in the morning and afternoon.

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The water cloud model (WCM) can be inverted to estimate leaf area index (LAI) using the intensity of backscatter from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors. Published studies have demonstrated that the WCM can accurately estimate LAI if the model is effectively calibrated. However, calibration of this model requires access to field measures of LAI as well as soil moisture. In contrast, machine learning (ML) algorithms can be trained to estimate LAI from satellite data, even if field moisture measures are not available. In this study, a support vector machine (SVM) was trained to estimate the LAI for corn, soybeans, rice, and wheat crops. These results were compared to LAI estimates from the WCM. To complete this comparison, in situ and satellite data were collected from seven Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) sites located in Argentina, Canada, Germany, India, Poland, Ukraine and the United States of America (U.S.A.). The models used C-Band backscatter intensity for two polarizations (like-polarization (VV) and cross-polarization (VH)) acquired by the RADARSAT-2 and Sentinel-1 SAR satellites. Both the WCM and SVM models performed well in estimating the LAI of corn. For the SVM, the correlation (R) between estimated LAI for corn and LAI measured in situ was reported as 0.93, with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.64 m2 m−2 and mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.51 m2 m−2. The WCM produced an R-value of 0.89, with only slightly higher errors (RMSE of 0.75 m2 m−2 and MAE of 0.61 m2 m−2) when estimating corn LAI. For rice, only the SVM model was tested, given the lack of soil moisture measures for this crop. In this case, both high correlations and low errors were observed in estimating the LAI of rice using SVM (R of 0.96, RMSE of 0.41 m2 m−2 and MAE of 0.30 m2 m−2). However, the results demonstrated that when the calibration points were limited (in this case for soybeans), the WCM outperformed the SVM model. This study demonstrates the importance of testing different modeling approaches over diverse agro-ecosystems to increase confidence in model performance.

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