The use of microwave SAR images for forest decline monitoring in mountainous area Original Research Article

In this paper, an attempt to use microwave images for the monitoring of forest deterioration in the Sudety Mountains has been made. For Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images acquired over mountainous area the removal of geometric and radiometric distortions should precede a thematic interpretation. In order to control the influence of digital terrain model on the accuracy of geocoding, a method of fast and precise rectification of SAR images to Polish topographic maps was elaborated. The dependence of the corrected and calibrated signal on the local incidence angle for different land cover forms was investigated. The classification aimed on a discrimination of forest from non forest area has been performed. The achieved accuracy depends on the choice of multi-temporal microwave data according to the varying moisture conditions.