Investigating Soil Moisture Dependency of the Ground Polarimetry under Agricultural Vegetation Estimated by SAR Tomography

Inhalt:
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Tomography enables the separation of ground and volume scattering components in natural scenarios and the estimation of their coherent polarimetric signatures by exploiting the full polarimetric space [1,2]. However, the estimated ground component may not be unique and depends on the constraints used in the regularization of the separation. In this paper, airborne multi-baseline SAR data at C-band over corn are used to discuss the ground polarimetry estimated using SAR Tomography in terms of the contributing scattering mechanisms at different acquisition dates for varying soil moisture conditions and vegetation height. A simple model for the ground polarimetry as the sum of surface and dihedral scattering is compared to the tomographic ground polarimetry using in-situ soil moisture measurements.