World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2019 83

An Attempt to Investigate Change in Crop Acreage with Soil Moisture Variations Derived
from Passive Microwave Data
Gagandeep Singh1; Hari Shanker Srivastava2 ; Shashi Mesapam3; and Parul Patel4
1
Dept. of Water Resources Development and Management, Indian Institute of Technology
Roorkee, India. E-mail: gagan.manuscripts@gmail.com
2
Agriculture and Soils Division, Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun, India. E-mail:
harishanker_srivastava@iirs.gov.in
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3
Dept. of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India. E-mail:
mes.shashi@gmail.com
4
Space Application Centre (SAC), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Ahmedabad,
India. E-mail: parul@sac.isro.gov.in

ABSTRACT
In this paper an attempt has been made to investigate change in crop acreage with soil
moisture variations derived from AMSR-E passive microwave data. A set of 38 soil moisture
and corresponding crop acreage observations for 6 Indian states viz. Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat,
Bihar, Haryana, and Western Uttar Pradesh were analysed which indicated that in general crop
acreage increases with increase in soil moisture. Results of statistical analysis (R 2) between crop
acreage and average soil moisture indicate that soil moisture is one of an important factor which
governs crop acreage. Results have also been validated using five independent observations and
resulted in a RMSE of 10.62. Study indicates the feasibility of use of large area soil moisture
information for the assessment of crop acreage.
Keywords: AMSR-E, crop acreage, soil moisture, passive microwave.

INTRODUCTION
India is an agriculture dominant country and agriculture contributes approximately 15% of
the GDP. However Indian economic development reflects that contribution of agriculture to
GDP has shown a declining trend but as far as the employability potential of the total workforce
and socio-economic development is concerned agriculture sector has been a major driving force.
Soil moisture can be measured in-situ using conventional methods with high accuracy but these
methods being labour intensive and point specific cannot be used for estimation of large area soil
moisture especially for spatial-temporal studies. Recent developments in satellite remote sensing
have proved enormous potential in estimating spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture
using optical, thermal and microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum [Srivastava et al.,
2015]. In the same context Microwave remote sensing is one of the best alternatives for large
area soil moisture estimation mainly because of the advantages like day-night and all-weather
coverage, ability of the microwaves to penetrate the ground [Srivastava et al., 2006; Shukla et al.,
2014]. Several studies have already shown the reliability of the soil moisture products retrieved
by active and passive microwave sensors and are being used effectively for soil moisture
retrieval [Srivastava et al., 2010; Singh et al., 2015]. Both active as well as passive microwave
remote sensing are being used very effectively to retrieve soil moisture. Active Microwave
remote sensing techniques have an upper edge as far as the spatial resolution is concerned. Also
the concept of soil moisture retrieval in active microwave remote sensing forms its basis on
sensing the backscatter coefficient using radars [Ulaby et al., 1996]. Many researchers have

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explored multi-incidence angle, multi-polarized, multi-frequency and temporal Synthetic

Aperture Radar (SAR) data to retrieve soil moisture under variety of agricultural heterogeneity
[Srivastava et al., 2002; Srivastava et al., 2003; Srivastava et al., 2006; Kornelsen and Coulibaly,
2013]. However, along with its strong sensitivity towards soil moisture, SAR signals are also
sensitive towards other target properties like surface roughness, vegetation cover and soil texture
[Patel et al., 2006; Srivastava et al., 2008; Patel et al., 2009; Srivastava et al., 2011]. Therefore,
due to its sensitivity towards other target properties soil moisture sensitivity decreases
significantly due to presence of these noise parameters in a resolution cell.
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On the other hand Passive Microwave remote sensing which forms its basis on sensing the
brightness temperatures using radiometers is also being used extensively to retrieve soil
moisture. A particular advantage of passive microwave sensors is that in the absence of
significant vegetation cover soil moisture is the dominant effect on the received signal [Patel et
al., 2015]. The spatial resolutions of passive microwave soil moisture sensors currently
conceived for space operation are in the range 10-20 km. However, soil moisture is highly
variable both spatially and temporally [Martinez et al., 2007] and passive microwave remote
sensing is capable of estimating soil moisture with better temporal resolution at a larger scale as
far as the area of observation is concerned.
Soil moisture is one of the many factors on which acreage depends. This study attempts to
investigate the change in crop acreage with soil moisture variations derived from passive
microwave data for various seasons and regions of the Indian sub-continent. The study considers
soil moisture as one of the indicators that can be used to assess acreage.

APPLICATIONS OF SOIL MOISTURE

Soil moisture is an utmost important parameter from the perspective of environmental and
climate studies. Soil Moisture reflects significant impacts on hydrological processes, agricultural
processes, meteorological processes, drought prediction and runoff generation [Verhoest et al.,
2008; Berthet et al., 2009; Brocca et al., 2014]. In addition soil moisture information is crucial
for weather forecasting, flood monitoring and crop yield forecasting [Bhagia et al., 1997]. It has
also proved to be productive in understanding impacts of global warming on water resources and
carbon balance phenomenon.
From agriculture point of view, soil moisture information is essential for many applications
like irrigation scheduling, plant stress and improving crop yield [Patel et al., 2006]. Furthermore,
the most prominent consequence of a drought is the extreme drop in the productivity which is
attributed to the deficiency of soil moisture in the root zone. When drought occurs there is a
deficiency in the amount of moisture in root zone, and consequently crop productivity
diminishes. Continuous soil moisture measurements can lead to improved crop yield forecasting
and irrigation planning. In case of flood prediction, by assessing how wet the soil was before a
rainstorm, it is possible to predict the potential for flooding to occur.
In meteorology soil moisture plays a major role in determination of the partitioning of net
radiation into latent and sensible heat components. Since soil moisture links together the water,
energy, and carbon exchanges between the land and the atmosphere, the accuracy of weather
prediction can be further enhanced by incorporating soil moisture measures. Soil moisture is the
primary factor controlling the hydrological synergism between soil, vegetation and the climate
which justifies its role in maintaining balance between water-energy and between land surface
and atmosphere [Koster et al., 2010]. Therefore, accurate and reliable soil moisture estimates are
essential in several applications as to examine the effect of climate change on land surface

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hydrological variables such as soil moisture, infiltration fluxes, runoff and surface temperature
caused by changes in heat fluxes; to quantify the amount and variability of regional water
resources in water limited regions of the world on seasonal and annual time scale.

AGRICULTURE SCENARIO OF INDIA

Agriculture is a critical sector in Indian economy. India holds the 2nd largest agricultural
land in the world. Agricultural land refers to the share of land area that is arable, under
permanent crops, and under permanent pastures. India is divided into 20 agro-climatic regions
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and all 15 major climates in the world exist in India. There are 46 different types of soils found
in India. The cropping system in India is extremely dynamic and there are number of factors
behind this. A major factor being the dependence of crop cultivation on rains as approximately
65% of the cropped area is rain fed, the remaining 35% area is irrigated. Records and estimates
show that 56% of the total food grain production comes from the irrigated areas. Also since
majority of the area is rain fed, the Indian farmers, who earn a lively hood only from farming,
tend to follow multiple cropping system in the rain fed areas. Moreover apart from growing
crops for a commercial motive they grow a variety of crops for self-sustenance. Therefore in
India single cropping systems as well as double cropping systems are prevalent. The most
dynamic cropping systems are being followed in the rain fed areas as highlighted earlier and as a
result the production from the rain fed areas is also less in addition to the fact that rainfall is a
natural phenomenon and every year considerable area under agriculture is destructed by floods.
In cases of droughts as well, the rain fed areas are worst hit as there is no other mode of
irrigation. Thus soil moisture estimation is of utmost importance especially in the rain fed
cropping areas, however it is equally important for the irrigated areas as well, but the importance
in case of rain dependent areas increases many folds, so for a desirable yield and production
proper irrigation is needed throughout the crop growth cycle, at a given growth stage the
response of crops to the water stress is different. Different crops have different water
requirements and respond differently to water stress. Crop sensitivity to water stress varies from
one growth stage to another. Therefore soil moisture can serve as a means to monitor and plan
the cropping activities and predict the response of crops to water stress at various crop stages is
of prime importance in making irrigation decisions. Another context which highlights the
importance of soil moisture estimation is that, the temporal variation of soil moisture during crop
growth cycle is an indicator of yield.

STUDY AREA
The study area covers 6 Indian states namely Bihar, Western Uttar Pradesh, Haryana
(including Delhi & Chandigarh), Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.

DATASET
Satellite data are obtained for entire Indian subcontinent using AMSR-E passive microwave
sensor. Gridded AMSR-E Level-3 soil moisture data product (AE_Land3) has been freely
downloaded from National Snow & Ice Data Center, NSIDC official website. The data product
corresponds to a 56 km mean spatial resolution, which has been further resampled to a global
cylindrical 25 km Equal-Area Scalable Earth Grid (EASE-Grid) cell spacing. The passive
satellite data acquired has been used for the seven years analysis from January 1, 2004 to
December 31, 2010. All downloaded files are in hierarchical data format earth observing system

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(HDF-EOS format) and each image formed a rectangular matrix with 135 rows x 173 columns as
per the geographical extent.
Crop Acreage Data for Kharif and Rabi season for the states in concern from the year 2004 to
2010 are obtained from the Crop Production Statistics Information System, an online portal
owned by Special Data Dissemination Standard Division, Directorate of Economics & Statistics
Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India, New Delhi.

DATA PROCESSING
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To cover the Indian subcontinent the spatial subset details used are as follows: Upper left
latitude- 40; Upper left longitude- 55; Lower right latitude- 5; Lower left longitude- 100. This
extent gives a rectangular matrix with 135 (rows) x 173(columns). The downloaded files were in
HDF format with following channels, ascending & descending soil moisture and ascending and
descending brightness temperatures.
The soil moisture data were extracted from ascending and descending passes using batch file
programming scripts and as a result for each day of the month 2 files in binary format are
extracted containing ascending and descending pass soil moisture data respectively.
Using C programming, the daily soil moisture binary files generated for both ascending and
descending passes were averaged respectively generating two binary files were again averaged to
get an average monthly soil moisture raster (binary format) for the entire Indian subcontinent.

Figure 1. AMSR-E derived average soil moisture maps for Haryana, Punjab, Bihar,
Western Uttar Pradesh, Eastern Rajasthan, Gujarat Region, Saurashtra & Kutch and
Gujarat Region respectively.
These binary raster maps were converted into TIF format using ENVI 4.7 software package

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which were then batch geo-referenced by developing a model using model builder in ArcGIS
10.1 software.

ANALYSIS
The average monthly soil moisture raster maps were generated after processing the satellite
datasets. Which were clipped for the areas under observation i.e. Bihar, Western Uttar Pradesh,
Haryana (including Delhi & Chandigarh), Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Average monthly soil
moisture values for each of these clipped areas were obtained for the months of November and
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June from 2004 to 2010. Also the acreage data (in hectares) in the months of November and July
was obtained from the Directorate of Economics & Statistics Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of
India.
The soil moisture variation derived from satellite data for the above mentioned states for the
months of June and November from 2004 to 2010 were analysed with the normalized acreage
values for the corresponding states for Rabi and Kharif season. Figure 1 shows AMSR-E derived
average soil moisture maps for Punjab, Haryana, Bihar, western Uttar Pradesh eastern Rajasthan,
Gujarat Region, Saurashtra & Kutch and Gujarat Region respectively. A total of 38 percentage
soil moisture and corresponding normalized acreage observations were used for analysis.
The crop acreage data (in hectares) obtained from the Crop Production Statistics Information
System online portal cannot be used directly for the analysis, the reason being that the absolute
crop acreage of various states or regions is not comparable with each other. For example, a state
or region with a larger geographical area and lower soil moisture may show relatively higher
crop acreage as compared to a state or region with a smaller geographical area and higher soil
moisture. Therefore in order to make the crop acreage data meaningful and comparable among
states/ regions irrespective of their geographical areas, attempt has been made to normalize the
values. For normalization of acreage, total arable land for each region was obtained from the
Ministry of Agriculture and the percentage of acreage data obtained for the corresponding state
was calculated. Similar procedure was adopted for all regions and finally normalized acreage
was obtained. Table 1 shows variations of normalized crop acreage with AMSR-E derived soil
moisture for a few randomly selected regions and seasons corresponding to the maps in figure 1.

Table 1. Variations of normalized crop acreage with AMSR-E derived soil moisture for a
few randomly selected regions and seasons.
S. No. Code Region Season Normalised AMSR-E derived
Acreage soil moisture
1 A Haryana Kharif 33.78 13.99
2 B Punjab Kharif 59.34 20.19
3 C Bihar Rabi 33.72 13.13
4 D Western Uttar Pradesh Kharif 20.44 9.52
5 E Eastern Rajasthan Rabi 20.37 10.71
6 F Gujarat Region Rabi 14.77 8.99
7 G Saurashtra & Kutch Rabi 5.96 6.35
8 H Gujarat Region Kharif 10.39 8.78

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RESULTS & DISCUSSION

The graph shows the plot obtained between percentage soil moisture and normalized acreage.
Soil moisture being an essential factor which governs acreage, shows a coefficient of
determination of 0.77 and hence displays that soil moisture is strongly related to acreage.
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Figure 2. Variation of Normalized Acreage- Percentage Soil Moisture & their Relationship
with each other.
Figure 2 shows the best fit curve, which is logarithmic in nature. The equation of the curve is
A  49.796ln  %Sm   92.012
Where,
A , Represents the normalized acreage and % Sm represents percentage surface soil
moisture.
Thereafter 5 observations were used for validation and RMSE of 10.62 was observed.

CONCLUSION
In this paper an attempt has been made to investigate change in crop acreage with soil
moisture variations derived from passive microwave data for various seasons and regions of
Indian Sub-continent. AMSR-E soil moisture data was used to estimate average percentage soil
moisture of the areas in concern and the crop acreage data was obtained from the reliable
sources. The study was conducted to find out relationship of percentage soil moisture and
normalized crop acreage considering the fact that crop acreage depends on a several parameters
like weather forecasts, availability of water, climatic conditions where soil moisture is one of the
important parameter which affects crop acreage. The results show that there is existence of a
decent coefficient of determination of 0.77 between the percentage soil moisture and normalized
crop acreage data which suggests that the model developed represents the relationship between
soil moisture and crop acreage. However the soil moisture data used in this study is obtained
from a passive microwave sensor AMSR-E which distributes the data product at 25 km spatial
resolution but the fact that passive microwave data provides high temporal resolution and large
area coverage is anytime a preference over SAR data. Using active microwave SAR data for
large area soil moisture estimation is almost impractical. Although the soil moisture derived from
AMSR-E do not give exact representation of the soil moisture status on ground which is due to

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large variability in soil moisture within the coarse-resolution cell offered by passive sensors and
existence of mixed pixels due to large pixel size of AMSR-E data also introduces error in soil
moisture retrieval and research shows that if AMSR-E soil moisture is retrieved incorporating
the vegetation/roughness parameter, g then the accuracy of soil moisture can be improved.

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