L-and P-band Tomography Synergies

Research Project, 2018 – 2019

The project aim is to consolidate past research and development, and enable the development of a robust forest parameter retrieval applicable to the Level-2 forest biomass and height inversion based on tomographic synthetic aperture radar data stacks. The following high level objectives shall be addressed:
1. Enhance the understanding of tomographic SAR data by
a. providing a better assessment of the relationship between forest biomass and height and tomographic data.
b. investigating super-resolution algorithms while preserving the sensitivity to forest parameters.
c. investigating which structural information can be retrieved from SAR data that is invariant to dielectric variations.
2. Extend the study results and performance assessment to novel tomographic campaign datasets such as those collected at Traunstein and during AfriSAR.
3. Identify synergies of TomoSAR, PolInSAR and PolSAR biomass inversion schemes.
4. Consolidate the scientific results and propose a Level-2 forest biomass and height retrieval algorithm for boreal forests based on TomoSAR data.