INDREX-II – Tropical Forest Height estimation with L and P Band Polarimetric interferometric SAR

Abstract:
Tropical forests are complex, heterogeneous, dense, remote and changing forest ecosystems. Low frequency synthetic aperture Radar (SAR) techniques allow monitoring and potentially estimation of key forest parameters such as vertical structure (height) and biomass. In the frame of INDREX-II repeat-pass SAR data in quad-pol mode (at L, and P Band) SAR data were acquired and simultaneously ground measurements have been collected. One of the most important - for a wide range of applications - forest parameter is biomass. Biomass appears to be more or less directly related to forest height, which can be estimated from model based inversion of polarimetric and interferometric SAR (Pol-InSAR) data. Indeed, successful height inversion has been demonstrated in several airborne experiments over temperate and boreal forests. In this paper results of model-based L and P Band Pol-InSAR data inversion over tropical forest are shown, including validation against ground measurements.