Pol-InSAR based snow depth retrieval using spaceborne TerraSAR-X data

In recent years the microwave remote sensing using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has immerged as a great technique for snow and glacier related studies. Due to the penetration power of the microwave inside the dry snow cover, and property of interacting with it dielectrically, focuses the researcher's attention in developing a SAR based robust method for retrieval of various snow parameters. Snow cover regions are mostly covered with clouds and hazy weather. SAR provides all weather, day-night space borne data in the nearly meter range resolution, even for those areas which are mostly covered with clouds and haze whole year operating in the long wavelength region. Various studies based on different backscatter based models like IEM and Small perturbation model have been done for the calculating the snow properties. Different semi-empirical model based techniques [1] also been implemented in the past which are region dependent and provides good accuracy for a given area only. This study focuses on developing a PolInSAR based technique for finding various snow parameters, mainly snow depth and snow water equivalent. The high resolution X-band spaceborne data has been used for this study. The Polarimetric SAR Interferometric technique provides us opportunity to utilize both polarimetric and interferometric properties of the SAR data for snow parameter retrieval with high accuracy. The coherence amplitude method is used for snow depth retrieval. The ground data was acquired by the ground station of SASE, DRDO in the Dhundi region of Manali, Himachal Pradesh for the same dates of Space borne TerraSAR-X acquisitions.