THE EFFECT OF SURFACE-ROUGHNESS ON MULTIFREQUENCY POLARIMETRIC SAR DATA

In this paper, multifrequency, polarimetric SAR data acquired during t he second SIR-C/XSAR mission over the Matera (Italy) test site are ana lyzed, The main objective of the study is to assess the possibility of extracting relevant information about surface roughness using polarim etry, The methodology is expected to be of interest either for derivin g maps of surface roughness or for setting up soil moisture retrieving procedure based on a preliminary estimation of soil roughness, After a description of ground data, experimental, and theoretical backscatte ring coefficients are investigated, In a further step, the dependence of copolarized correlation coefficient on the roughness and moisture s tates is addressed, In order to investigate the polarization effect, t he correlation coefficient is derived for any set of orthogonal polari zations, The results indicate an enhanced sensitivity of the correlati on coefficient on roughness using circular polarizations, The analysis is subsequently extended to additional data sets acquired in the fram e of SIR-C/XSAR experiment (Les Landes forest, France) and AIRSAR expe riment (Chickasha, USA), These further investigations confirm the tren d observed on Matera data.