Analysis of multi-temporal land observation at C-band

The availability of reliable land cover information is crucial for a wide range of applications, like for example monitoring of land use change and land degradation as well as administrative matters in global, regional and local scales. In this paper the potential of SENTINEL-1 C-band SAR data for land cover applications, e.g. generating level-2 land cover classification products has been investigated. Therefore, the planned short revisit and dual polarization concept of SENTINEL-1 has been simulated using multi-temporal ERS-2 and ENVISAT ASAR AP C-band backscatter intensity data. For classification, several multi-temporal metrics and the minimum amount of SAR data acquired during one growing season have been analyzed to derive five basic land cover classes with accuracies greater than 85%.