Abstract:
Abstract: Due to its unique superiority on soil property monitoring, microwave remote sensing is considered to be one of the most valuable means of soil property detection. Being a property of soil related to moisture in arid and semiarid regions, the salinity of soil has negative impact on crop yield. But there is little formal study corresponded to the application of microwave remote sensing on monitoring of soil salinity. Additionally, the dielectric properties are the basis of microwave remote sensing for earth observation, and also the key parameters of relationship establishment between the backscattering coefficient and soil parameters (moisture, salt content). In the present study, the corrective moist salt soil Dobson dielectric model was adopted as a fundamental model to simulate the soil dielectric constant. We also analyzed the response of soil dielectric constants to model parameters and verified the applicability of the corrective moist salt soil Dobson dielectric model by using field collected data at Wei-kuqa river oasis. We found that: 1) In low frequency regions (i.e., 0.5 < f < 5 GHz), soil dielectric constant has an obvious response to soil volumetric water content and soil salt content;2) With a relatively high correlation coefficient (R > 0.95) of the corresponding linear regression model, the soil moisture content significantly correlated to the real part of soil dielectric constant; 3) Based on obvious response of imaginary part of soil dielectric constant to soil salt content (R=0.86), soil salt content determines the value of soil dielectric constant imaginary part. In the low frequency region, soil dielectric constant significantly correlated to the volumetric water content and soil salt content. In all frequency regions of studied electromagnetic wave, the real part of permittivity had a significant response to the soil volumetric water content, and it increased with the increasing of water content. As to the imaginary part of the permittivity, dielectric constant slightly increased with the decreasing of water content, which indicated the soil moisture directly determined the real part of soil dielectric constant. Imaginary part of the soil dielectric constant apparently responded to soil salinity, and the soil salt content obviously determined the imaginary part of the dielectric constant, especially in the lower frequency. We concluded that the corrective moist salt soil Dobson dielectric model can objectively describe the soil dielectric constant and the values estimated were approximate to the measured soil dielectric constant. This research showed that the soil dielectric constant can be used to monitor the degree of soil salt content, water content and soil salinization, and it is feasible to use the saline soil dielectric model to invert the soil salinity.