Dry snow extent monitoring using multi-frequency and multi-temporal polarimetric indicators

A new method to discriminate dry snow in alpine regions is presented. Due to the wide variety of Alpine environments, the scene under study is first segmented into surface and forested area classes from L and C-band summer polarimetric SAR data. Dry snow is then discriminated over each class using adapted methods. A new polarimetric multi-temporal optimization procedure, named PCVE, is proposed to increase the slight polarimetric contrast due to the presence of snow over surfaces. Snow covered forests are discriminated using performing polarimetric indicators resulting from a decomposition of incoherent matrix representations. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated over a French alpine test site using SIR-C L and C-band polarimetric SAR data