Moderate soil moisture over Pakistan: Agricultural growth on Cards ?

Pakistan’s agriculture sector accounts for about 23% of GDP and employs about half of the labour force, hence parameters influencing crop yield are crucial. 1. Soil moisture is one of the main parameters that influence crop health, monitoring which in near real-time is beneficial for farmers to adopt different agricultural practices for the betterment of yield. The above figure shows the average soil moisture (March-June 2018) map for Pakistan. As it can be inferred from the figure that the soil moisture for the period under analysis shows good results. It may be an indicator of good yield this season.

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
  1. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Pakistan

About the author: Catherin Sebastian

The author is a research enthusiast, she has completed her M.Tech. in Remote Sensing and GIS, from NIT Warangal. Her expertise includes the application of microwave satellite remote sensing for providing the solutions in Water Resources and Agriculture.

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  1. Jauhar Mustafa - May 20, 2019 Reply

    Thank you ma’am. Could you please tell me the appropriate and UI friendly sites for easy downloading of soil moisture data? 🙂

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