Advances in polarimetric SAR interferometry and its application to geo/eco-environmental stress change monitoring

Radar polarimetry has established itself in high resolution POL-SAR imaging, image target characterization and selective image feature extraction. With the addition of single platform dual antenna interferometers, digital elevation mapping (DEM) was made possible (which can be recovered in most cases equally well from standard fully polarimetric POL-SAR image data utilizing the Schuler purely polarimetric DEM algorithms not requiring an interferometer). In order to be able to fully describe direction-sensitive environmental stress changes, it is necessary to rapidly advance repeat-pass (RP) fully polarimetric (POL: scattering matrix) differential (D) interferometric (In) SAR imaging systems (RP-POL-D-InSAR) which have emerged with the SIR-C/X-SAR Missions 1 and 2. In pursuing this goal, Cloude and Pottier (1997) introduced the polarimetric entropy/anisotropy method and Cloude and Papathanassiou (1997) introduced the polarimetric-interferometric phase coherence optimization (PIPCO) procedure. This PIPCO procedure is verified in this paper by utilizing an ideally matching repeat-pass pair of the SIR-C/X-SAR Mission 2, Tien-Shan tracks within the Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Division, Buriat Natural Science Center (RAS-SD-BNSC) SE Baikal Lake, Selenga Delta (Kabansk-Kudara-Oymur: 52.16/spl deg/ N, 106.67/spl deg/ E) Geo-environmental Sanctuary, the "Kudara Polygon" for which various institutes of RAS-SD-BNSC have collected extensive geographic (geo-ecological and geo- tectonic) environmental information and vegetative groundtruth data over several decades.