| Abstract | In Canada, agricultural surveys are conducted annually, to gather information and associated statistics on crops, rangelands, livestock and other agricultural resources. Data requirements include total
cropland, crop type, crop vigour, yields, planting dates, harvesting dates, chemicals used, crop damage, etc. Research has demonstrated that certain types of crop information can be extracted from radar data in a timely fashion (Brown et al. 1993).
In this study, RADARSAT-1 fine beam mode data were acquired in both ascending and descending orbits on August 3, 1996 for a test site near Miami, Manitoba. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of meteorological events such as
dew, temperature and rain on identifying crop type classes. Ground data were collected for various crop type classes within the test site. Meterological data (precipitation and temperature) were obtained for the times of the RADARSAT-1 acquisition.
Transformed Divergence Statistics were calculated for each crop pair. The results demonstrate that the separablity between crop types did not change even when meterological conditions for the dawn orbit were wetter than the dusk orbit. It would
appear that the moisture conditions were insuffcient to impact crop separablity. |