A time series of SAR tomographic profiles of a snowpack

Inhalt:
Recently, the SnowScat hardware – a tower-mounted fully-polarimetric scatterometer at X-/Ku-band – has been enhanced to also provide a tomographic profiling mode which allows to obtain high-resolution 2-D vertical profiles that may provide further insights into the electromagnetic interaction within layered snowpacks. In winter 2014/2015, a first test campaign was carried out yielding a successful proof of concept of the hardware, tomographic measurement, and basic processing concept. As a follow-up, in Nov/Dec 2015, the SnowScat device was installed at a test site on 1700m altitude close to the Grimsel pass in Switzerland. Since then it has been acquiring a time series of tomographic profiles of a snow pack. In this paper, we present and discuss first results of this new time series.