Airborne Ku-band radar remote sensing of terrestrial snow cover

Author

Yueh, Simon ; Cline, Donald ; Elder, Kelly

Author_Institution

California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena

fYear

2007

fDate

23-28 July 2007

Firstpage

1211

Lastpage

1214

Abstract

Preliminary analyses of the POLSCAT data acquired from the CLPX-II in winter 2006-2007 are described in this paper. The data showed the response of the Ku-band radar echoes to snowpack changes for various types of background vegetation. We observed about 0.4 dB increase in backscatter for every 1 cm SWE accumulation for sage brush and agricultural fields. The data also showed the impact of surface hoar growth and freeze/thaw cycles, which created large snow grain sizes and ice lenses, respectively, and consequently increased the radar signals by a few dBs.

Keywords

airborne radar; backscatter; polarimetry; radar cross-sections; remote sensing by radar; snow; vegetation; AD 2006 to 2007; CLPX-II; Cold Land Process Experiment; POLSCAT data; agricultural fields; airborne Ku-band radar; backscatter; freeze-thaw cycles; ice lenses; polarimetric scatterometer; radar echoes; radar signals; remote sensing; snow grain sizes; snowpack changes; surface hoar growth impact; terrestrial snow cover; vegetation; Laboratories; Propulsion; Radar measurements; Radar remote sensing; Radar scattering; Remote sensing; Snow; Spaceborne radar; Vegetation mapping; Water storage; microwave remote sensing; radar; snow water;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2007. IGARSS 2007. IEEE International

Conference_Location

Barcelona

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1211-2

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-1212-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2007.4423023

Filename

4423023