Regional Scale Rice Yield Estimation by Using a Time-series of RADARSAT ScanSAR Images

This paper demonstrates that RADARSAT ScanSAR data can be an important data source of radar remote sensing for monitoring crop systems and estimation of rice yield for large areas in tropic and sub-tropical regions. Experiments were carried out to show the effectiveness of RADARSAT ScanSAR data for rice yield estimation in whole province of Guangdong, South China. A methodology was developed to deal with a series of issues in extracting rice information from the ScanSAR data, such as topographic influences, levels of agro-management, irregular distribution of paddy fields and different rice cropping systems. A model was provided for rice yield estimation based on the relationship between the backscatter coefficient of multi-temporal SAR data and the biomass of rice.