Need of satellite data for finding the surface soil moisture in farms
In India, the agricultural land has been decreasing at an alarming rate each year (based on the report of the world bank) and a drastic reduction in the agricultural labourers leads to the rapid mechanisation of the agriculture sector inorder to provide food grains for the growing population. Hence, exploiting the advanced technologies in farming is indeed necessary. The satellites which are orbiting continuously provide high resolution data of earth surface, that are useful for computing various aspects such as surface soil moisture, NDVI, EVI and other indices.
Soil moisture can be defined as the water molecules that are held between the soil particles. Measuring surface soil moisture (top surface of the earth) is necessary for timely and proper irrigation of the croplands.
Difficulties in measuring surface soil moisture:
- If there are larger farms it is very hard to check the soil moisture all over the farm manually.
- Installing the sensors at different parts of the farm for measuring the soil moisture is expensive and cannot be suitable for global level.
- Crops such as sugarcane, wheat which are tall and difficult to intrude, end up with incomplete irrigation or over irrigation at some parts of the farm.
Advantages of satellite derived soil moisture:
- Irrespective of atmospheric conditions such as clouds the level of soil moisture is measured.
- These data are provided at low cost compared with other technologies.
- The soil moisture of a farm anywhere in the world can be computed and visualised in mobile application.
Satyukt Analytics Pvt Ltd has developed several methodologies to compute the soil moisture using multi-satellite data, which is a near real-time data that can be effectively used for advanced farming at minimal human power. Using our mobile application it is easy to monitor the soil moisture of a farm anywhere and the below figure, shows the same of a farm. The ground truth has been verified several times to check the accuracy of the satellite data (Tomer et al., 2016) with the soil moisture of the farms.
