Drainage Duration Variability and PALSAR-2 Sensitivity to Rice-Field Water Status: Insights from Large-Scale In Situ Water-Level Observations

Achieving scalable monitoring of Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) for methane mitigation in rice cultivation depends on establishing field benchmarks for drainage behavior and demonstrating that satellite observations can reliably detect corresponding changes in water status. We analyzed about two million high-frequency in situ water-level observations from hundreds of sensors deployed in rice fields across the Philippines and Japan to quantify drainage duration from near-surface conditions to 15 cm below the soil surface and to test the sensitivity of open-access PALSAR-2 dual-polarization L-band SAR to vertical water-level variations. Across 564 drainage events, the median drainage duration was 19.0 h, and only 0.9% of events exceeded 240 h, indicating that drainage happens generally within a day. Seasonal differences were evident in Pangasinan, while small Chiba and Cagayan samples suggested exploratory longer-duration patterns; multiple drainage events occurred in 48.0% of Philippine dry-season fields but only 21.6% of wet-season fields. PALSAR-2 data showed a statistical significance in detecting inundation at Mid crop growth stage with cross-polarization band, but the significant overlap induces challenges in operational applications. These results provide empirical benchmarks for AWD-related drainage dynamics while showing that dual-polarization PALSAR-2 alone is unlikely to support robust field-scale monitoring of rice-field water status.