A Multi-Frequency SAR Tomographic Characterization of Sub-Surface Ice Volumes

Inhalt:
The application of SAR Tomography (TomoSAR) to glaciers is in a rather early stage, essentially due to the limited amount of experimental and validation data. In order to contribute to fill this gap, the objective of this paper is to present first results in the characterization of the available 3-D backscattered signal of ice volumes at different frequencies. Experiments are carried out to identify different kind of scatterers, and to analyse their behaviour across the polarimetric channels at different frequencies. In addition, the presence of (polarimetric) anisotropic propagation effects is investigated. Accordingly, scattering model assumptions and requirements for the inversion of physical structure parameters are discussed. The experimental analysis is carried out by processing multibaseline SAR data acquired by DLR in the ARCTIC15 campaign.