RESUMO
Soil moisture (SM) plays a fundamental role in the terrestrial water cycle and in agriculture, with key applications such as the monitoring of crop growing and hydrogeological management. In this study, a calibration procedure was applied to estimate SM based on the integration of in situ and airborne thermal remote sensing data. To this aim, on April 2018, two airborne campaigns were carried out with the TASI-600 multispectral thermal sensor on the Petacciato (Molise, Italy) area. Simultaneously, soil samples were collected in different agricultural fields of the study area to determine their moisture content and the granulometric composition. A WorldView 2 high-resolution visible-near infrared (VNIR) multispectral satellite image was acquired to calculate the albedo of the study area to be used together with the TASI images for the estimation of the apparent thermal inertia (ATI). Results show a good correlation (R² = 0.62) between the estimated ATI and the SM of the soil samples measured in the laboratory. The proposed methodology has allowed us to obtain a SM map for bare and scarcely vegetated soils in a wide agricultural area in Italy which concerns cyclical hydrogeological instability phenomena.
RESUMO
The ISTIMES project, funded by the European Commission in the frame of a joint Call "ICT and Security" of the Seventh Framework Programme, is presented and preliminary research results are discussed. The main objective of the ISTIMES project is to design, assess and promote an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)-based system, exploiting distributed and local sensors, for non-destructive electromagnetic monitoring of critical transport infrastructures. The integration of electromagnetic technologies with new ICT information and telecommunications systems enables remotely controlled monitoring and surveillance and real time data imaging of the critical transport infrastructures. The project exploits different non-invasive imaging technologies based on electromagnetic sensing (optic fiber sensors, Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite platform based, hyperspectral spectroscopy, Infrared thermography, Ground Penetrating Radar-, low-frequency geophysical techniques, Ground based systems for displacement monitoring). In this paper, we show the preliminary results arising from the GPR and infrared thermographic measurements carried out on the Musmeci bridge in Potenza, located in a highly seismic area of the Apennine chain (Southern Italy) and representing one of the test beds of the project.
