Soil moisture is important for various applications e.g. hydrology, agriculture and meteorology. Some of the applications where soil moisture is useful are:

• Optimal irrigation in farms
• Identify areas being over-irrigated
• Improved flood risk estimation
• Monitor agricultural drought in near real-time
• Improved weather forecast
• Analyze the impact of an irrigation project
• Identify the irrigated area by an irrigation source
• Automatic billing of farm based on the actual irrigation
• Estimation of actual evapotranspiration taking place
• Estimation of area getting degraded

The soil moisture can be measured using ground observations, sensors or satellite data. The traditional ground observations need lots of human resources and time, if we have to monitor the soil moisture regularly. So the manual ground observations are not effective and pretty costly. However the sensors can be used to get information at high daily frequency with ease, but the spatial coverage is very much limited in sensors. 

Satellites can provide high spatial coverage and temporal revisit. Soil moisture can be measured using the active and passive microwave satellite data. The active microwave satellites have high spatial resolution but low temporal resolution, whereas the passive  microwave satellites have low spatial resolution but high temporal resolution. 

Satyukt Analytics Pvt Ltd have developed an innovative operational and monitoring methodology based on Microwave Satellite remote sensing technology using active microwave satellite data and passive microwave data for retrieving relative soil moisture data at high spatio-temporal resolution. Since independently active microwave (SAR) and passive microwave sensors fail to deliver soil moisture maps at the required spatio-temporal resolution and accuracy, attempts were made to combine both products to attain this objective (Tomer et al., 2016). The combination of different satellite data would immensely improve the spatial and temporal resolution of soil moisture to enhance the applicability of soil moisture data in fine scale applications such as precision irrigation.