Separate Estimation of Faraday Rotation and Topography Effects from Polarimetric SAR Data

Abstract:
An importance of utilization the longer wavelength spaceborne SAR for remote sensing of natural Earth covers (forests, sea surface, land use, etc) was underlined in many papers during last decades. But in spite of obvious preference of measurements at lower frequencies, the data in linear polarization basis are corrupted by the influence of propagating media and geometry of scattering surface. One of the ionospheric effects corrupting the measurements of surface scattering properties is Faraday rotation of electromagnetic wave plane. Topography introduces orientation angle shift in polarimetric data. It may be shown that analysis of phases of diagonal elements of scattering matrix in circular basis provides the way of separate estimation of ionospheric and topography effects.