Interferometric Multi-Chromatic Analysis of COSMO-SkyMed data for height retrieval

The Multi-Chromatic Analysis can be applied to interferometric pairs of SAR images processed at range sub-bands, and consists of exploring the phase trend of each pixel as a function of the different central carrier frequencies. The phase of stable scatterers evolves linearly with the sub-band central wavelength, with a slope proportional to the absolute e.m. path difference. The technique appears optimally suited for the new generation of satellite sensors, which operate with larger bandwidths than previously available instruments, generally limited to few tens of MHz. A first experiment on satellite data was carried out by processing a spotlight interferometric pair of images acquired by TerraSAR-X on the well-known Uluru monolith in Australia. In the present work, we illustrate MCA processing on SAR data acquired over the same site by the COSMO-SkyMed constellation. The topographic profile of the monolith is successfully reconstructed. Furthermore, the results are also compared with those previously derived by processing TerraSAR-X data.