Polarimetric analysis from compact-pol measurements: Potential and limitation

Global warming is now known to be the major environmental issue mankind will have to face in the next decade. Monitoring of vegetation and biomass is clearly an essential piece of information required at all levels ranging from the scientific studies to understand and forecast, to the political actors and government leaders responsible for drafting remediation policies and evaluating their impact. Microwave remote sensing with the low-frequency SAR technique can provide a useful characterization of forest (spatial coverage, species, density, height...) at a global scale, relying on the all-weather imaging capabilities of SAR linked with the significant penetration of the low-frequency EM wave in the canopy. The published techniques for forest characterization from low frequency SAR data include radiometry inversion, polarimetric inversion based on the anisotropy parameters and PolInSAR Random Volume Over Ground inversion. In this paper, we will more specifically concentrate on the PolSAR technique and the impact of ionospheric effect.