Soil roughness
Although the effects of land management on roughness can vary due to soil characteristics, large roughness variations across a field are small. Consequently roughness will be measured at only two sites in each field. In addition, roughness will be measured only once since the SMAPVEX16-MB campaign will begin after seeding and further effects due to management activity are not expected.
Soil surface roughness will be measured over two sites of the selected fields using a digital camera and a 1 m-long profilometer installed in the look directions of Passive/Active L-band Sensor (PALS) and RADARSAT-2 sensor (descending mode). To adequately measure the correlation length, roughness measurements will be taken over 3-metre profiles. For each field, mean roughness values will be derived from the pictures of the 3-metre profiles taken at two sites with the digital camera.
| Acquisitions | ||
|---|---|---|
| Instruments | PALS | RADARSAT-2 |
| Needle profilometer | Needle profilometer | |
| Number of sites per field | 2 (same sites as RADARSAT-2) | 2 (same sites as PALS) |
| Number of replicates per site | 1 | 1 |
| Number of profiles per site | 3 (placed end-to-end) | 3 (placed end-to-end) |
| Number of field visits | 1 | 1 |