Abstract
Soil moisture content is a very important factor in terms of energy exchange and water cycle on Earth and has a great impact in many areas regarding assessment of natural risks, hydrology, ecology, agriculture, and climate science. Soil moisture can greatly change spatially and temporally, especially depending on land use changes, and the changing soil moisture may cause various environmental and ecological problems. In this respect, it is an important research subject to examine the spatial change of soil moisture content on large scales. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors play an important role in detecting soil moisture because they are sensitive to soil moisture and they cover large areas. In this study, it was aimed to investigate the determination of the spatial and temporal variation of soil moisture content using fully polarimetric RADARSAT-2 images in wheat cultivated field and fallow land located in The General Directorate of Agricultural Enterprises Gözlü Agricultural Enterprise. The in-situ measurements obtained monthly from field surveys between March and October 2016 were compared with the backscatter values of SAR images. As a result of the study, negative and positive correlation coefficients varying from -0.65 to 0.67 were obtained between backscatter values and in-situ soil moisture values. The highest correlations for soil moisture were obtained in the cultivated area during the May-June period, which is the growing stage of wheat, and the best results for both areas were determined with VV polarimetric data.