Applications of air-borne polarimetric-interferometric and tomographic SAR: POL-IN/TOMO-SAR repeat-pass imagery to environmental stress-change monitoring

In polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (POL-IN-SAR) imaging it is possible to recover textural and spatial information from POL-IN-SAR digital image data sets simultaneously including the extraction of digital elevation maps (DEMs) from either polarimetric (scattering matrix) or interferometric (dual antenna) SAR systems. Simultaneous polarimetric-plus-interferometric SAR offers the additional benefit of obtaining co-registrated textural-plus-spatial three-dimensional POL-IN-DEM information which when applied to repeat-pass image-overlay interferometry provides differential background and environmental stress-change information with high accuracies. Then, by either designing multiple dual polarization SAR antenna POL-IN-SAR systems or by applying advanced POL-IN-SAR image compression techniques will result in polarimetric tomographic (multiple interferometric) SAR or POL-TOM-SAR imaging. This novel three-dimensional high-resolution fine structure stress-change sensing and imaging technique is of direct and immediate relevance to wide-area dynamic surveillance and local-to-global environmental background, stress and stress-change monitoring of the terrestrial and planetary covers.