Measuring the roughness characteristics of natural surfaces at pixel scales: moving from 1 metre to 25 metre profiles

Author

Davidson, M. ; Le Toan, T. ; Borgeaud, Maurice ; Manninen, T.

Author_Institution

Centre d´´Etude de ka Biophys., Toulouse, France

Volume

3

fYear

1998

fDate

6-10 Jul 1998

Firstpage

1200

Abstract

This paper describes the motivation behind and the characteristics of a laser profiler which has been specifically tailored to the measurement of surface roughness characteristics of importance in the radar electromagnetic scattering studies-and hence inversion and retrieval algorithms. The main feature of this profiler is its capability of recording roughness profiles at the scale of the spaceborne SAR resolution, which is roughly of the order of 25 meters for current radar satellites such as ERS-2 or RADARSAT

Keywords

backscatter; geophysical techniques; measurement by laser beam; radar cross-sections; remote sensing by radar; surface topography measurement; synthetic aperture radar; backscatter; geophysical measurement technique; inversion; land surface; laser profiler; laser profiling; natural surface; pixel scale; radar electromagnetic scattering; radar remote sensing; radar scattering; retrieval algorithm; rough surface; roughness characteristics; spaceborne radar; terrain mapping; Electromagnetic measurements; Electromagnetic scattering; Laser radar; Radar measurements; Radar scattering; Rough surfaces; Spaceborne radar; Surface emitting lasers; Surface roughness; Synthetic aperture radar;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Proceedings, 1998. IGARSS '98. 1998 IEEE International

Conference_Location

Seattle, WA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4403-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/IGARSS.1998.691350

Filename

691350