Understanding the temporal behavior of crops using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2-like data for agricultural applications

TLDR: In this paper, the authors analyzed the temporal trajectory of remote sensing data for a variety of winter and summer crops that are widely cultivated in the world (wheat, rapeseed, maize, soybean and sunflower).

About: This article is published in Remote Sensing of Environment.The article was published on 2017-09-15 and is currently open access. It has received 468 citations till now.

Figures

Figure 7: Observations on maize, soybean and sunflower fields: temporal behavior of optical NDVI, radar VH/VV, VH, and 518 VV, rainfalls and temperatures over summer crops, i.e. 57 maize crops (in blue), 8 soybean crops (in green) and 116 519 sunflower crops (in red). Mean values are represented by dots and standard deviations are represented by the filled 520 color domains surrounding the curves. In the last plot (Bottom), temperatures in red were measured at the Sentinel-1 521 acquisition time 6 a.m. Vertical precipitation bars in blue are drawn in green the same days than Sentinel-1 acquisitions 522 and in red the two days before Sentinel-1 acquisitions, assuming that wet soil due to rainfalls may still affect Sentinel-1 523 backscatter two days later. Vertical grey bars represent Sentinel-1 acquisition events. The typical periods of sowing and 524 harvest are indicated by the grey shaded areas. 525

Figure 5: Observations over winter wheat and rapeseed fields: temporal behavior of optical NDVI, radar VH/VV, VH, and 427 VV, rainfalls and temperatures over winter crops, i.e. 64 wheat crops (in blue) and 10 rapeseed crops (in red). Mean 428 values are represented by dots and standard deviations are represented by the filled color domains surrounding the 429 curves. In the last plot (bottom), temperatures in red were measured at the Sentinel-1 acquisition time 6 a.m. Vertical 430 precipitation bars in blue are drawn in green the same days than Sentinel-1 acquisitions and in red the two days before 431 Sentinel-1 acquisitions, assuming that wet soil due to rainfalls may still affect Sentinel-1 backscatter two days later. 432 Vertical grey bars represent Sentinel-1 acquisition events. The typical periods of sowing and harvest are indicated by the 433 grey shaded areas. 434

Figure 3: Calendar of the remote sensing data acquisitions, expressed in month/year. At the top, the 71 optical data 306 acquisitions from: Landsat-8 (cross), Deimos (diamond), Formosat-2 (plus) and SPOT5-Take5 (triangles). At the bottom: 307 28 radar acquisitions from Sentinel-1 (circle). 308

Figure 1: Field data over a 70x40 km area in South-West France, superposed to very high resolution optical data from 184 Bing Map. Large circles represent the two Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) experimental 185 sites (Auradé and Lamasquère). Small circles represent the other crop fields studied in this paper. In this area, in average 186 between 2006 and 2013, 43% of cultivated crops were cereals, 25% were sunflower, 5% were maize and 5% rapeseed, 187 (from detailed French national land use database, the RPG (in French, Registre Parcellaire Graphique). 188

Figure 2: The experimental site of Auradé (surrounded in black) and its surroundings. Auradé is located 28 km south-west 191 of Toulouse, in France. At the top, the NDVI map derived from a SPOT5-Take5 image (10 m resolution) acquired on 29 192 April 2015; at the bottom, an RGB image of VV and VH backscatters from a Sentinel-1 image (20 m resolution) acquired 193 on 5 May 2015. Vegetated areas appear in green. The 17.5 x 12.5 km area is centered on 43.549°N, 1.106°E. 194

Figure 6: Observations on maize field: temporal behavior of optical NDVI, radar VH/VV, VH, and VV, rainfalls, 477 temperatures and soil water content (SWC) over the Lamasquère site, where maize was cultivated in 2015. The blue and 478 green profiles superposed to NDVI are fresh biomass and GAI, respectively. In the second to last plot, temperatures in 479 red were measured at the Sentinel-1 acquisition time 6 a.m. The horizontal red line is the 0 o

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Understanding the temporal behavior of crops using sentinel-1 and sentinel-2-like data for agricultural applications" ?

HAL this paper is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. 

Q2. what is the agro-hydrology of a distributed model?

701 Extracting Soil Water Holding Capacity Parameters of a Distributed Agro-Hydrological Model from 702 High Resolution Optical Satellite Observations Series. 

Q3. What is the purpose of the paper?

Assessment of 725 an operational system for crop type map production using high temporal and spatial resolution 726 satellite optical imagery.