Development and testing of processing software for an airborne soil moisture mapper

Abstract

Remote sensing is a useful way of obtaining data of a given target without being in physical contact. One of the means of remote sensing is through the use of microwaves. Using passive sensors like radiometers, it is possible to receive the energy emitted by the environment and receive different data and information about it. Useful data that can be retrieved using a radiometer is the soil moisture, which can be computed from the data received. Balamis is a hardware company which develops radiometers to be used to retrieve soil moisture. Currently they have developed three different frames to work with terrestrial vehicles, aircraft and RPAS. In this project it is presented how it is possible to compute and map said soil moisture. It also shows the creative process behind the creation of a software able to retrieve the soil moisture and the different versions developed to work with the different frames. There are shown the different tests that were performed in order to validate the software and its consequent results. As the main philosophy of Balamis is to approach radiometers to common people, it has been created a user interface to interact with the software. Said user interface has to be easy to understand and it is shown subsequently on this project. Finally, there was created a user manual with all of the relative information to the software. This manual can be found on the appendixes of this project, and has been validated by an outsider that tested the software and gave subsequent feedback to improve it and showed some future lines of work.