CARABAS measurements of coniferous forest stem volume on sloping terrain

Author

Smith, Gary ; Ulander, Lars M H ; Fransson, Johan E S ; Walter, Fredrik

Author_Institution

Dept. of Radio & Space Sci., Chalmers Univ. of Technol., Gothenburg, Sweden

Volume

7

fYear

2001

fDate

2001

Firstpage

3155

Abstract

Low frequency SAR has shown good results for the retrieval of stem volume in coniferous forests, where the scattering strength is directly related to the volume of the trunk. However, since the scattering is dominated by the trunk-ground dihedral mechanism, it is also sensitive to the topography (i.e. angle between trunk and ground). Using data from CARABAS, we show how the backscattering is sensitive to the topography and radar viewing geometry. However, unlike higher frequencies, the VHF scattering from trees on moderate slopes is still dominated by the trunk-ground interaction

Keywords

airborne radar; remote sensing by radar; synthetic aperture radar; vegetation mapping; 20 to 90 MHz; CARABAS data; CARABAS measurements; VHF scattering; airborne SAR; backscattering; coniferous forest stem volume; scattering strength; sloping terrain; synthetic aperture radar; topography; trunk volume; trunk-ground dihedral mechanism; trunk-ground interaction; viewing geometry; Backscatter; Bandwidth; Calibration; Dielectrics; Frequency; Reflectivity; Scattering; Signal to noise ratio; Surface topography; Volume measurement;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2001. IGARSS '01. IEEE 2001 International

Conference_Location

Sydney, NSW

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7031-7

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.2001.978288

Filename

978288