Telangana the state with agrarian economy depends mostly on rainfall for irrigation.According to the officials of IMD, Telangana has recorded deficient rainfall this year. Effective use of available water resources can help to tackle this situation without compromising agricultural yield. Soil moisture is one of the main parameters that influence crop health. Hence monitoring soil moisture in near real-time is beneficial for farmers to identify areas that need irrigation and thus can adopt different agricultural practices for the betterment of yield. The above figure shows the average soil moisture for the month of August over Telangana, India. As it can be inferred from the figure that the state is relatively dry at most of the places. The map identifies the areas that need to be irrigated. The soil moisture data at a higher resolution can even identify the spatial variation of soil moisture at farm scale.

Passive microwave sensors provide soil moisture globally at a coarser spatial resolution whereas active microwave sensors have higher spatial but low temporal resolution (2–4 weeks). Using soil moisture data directly from any of these sensors will have compromised spatial or temporal resolution. Satyukt Analytics Pvt Ltd has developed an innovative methodology which merges active and passive microwave data to obtain soil moisture data of high spatiotemporal resolution. Some of the applications where this high-resolution soil moisture data would be useful are:

• • Optimal irrigation in farms
  • Improved flood risk estimation
  • Monitor agricultural drought in near real time
  • Likely crop Yield
  • Irrigation Management
  • Improved weather forecast
  • Analyze the impact of an irrigation project
  • Automatic billing of farm based on the actual irrigation