An Empirical Study on the Impact of Changing Weather Conditions on Repeat-Pass SAR Tomography

Researches carried out in the last years have shown that the use of P-band SAR tomography (TomoSAR) largely improves the retrieval of the above-ground biomass (AGB) in tropical forests, providing a most encouraging element toward the systematic employment of TomoSAR techniques in the frame of the upcoming spaceborne mission BIOMASS. All of these researches were carried out using campaign data acquired in a single day, and under stable (mostly sunny) weather conditions. The impact of temporal decorrelation was considered in the literature by analyzing ground-based Radar data from the TropiSCAT campaign (Paracou, French Guiana), and found not to be a show-stopper for BIOMASS tomography. Yet, the validity of this analysis was limited to sunny days only. Accordingly, a precise assessment of the impact of changing weather conditions on TomoSAR is currently missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a first experimental element to fill this gap. To do this, data from the TropiSCAT archive are reprocessed to mimic BIOMASS repeat-pass tomography. Since BIOMASS tomography will be implemented by taking seven acquisitions with a revisit time of three days, we form tomograms by taking two TropiSCAT antennas every three days (and three antennas on the last day), which means that any single tomogram is actually obtained by mixing seven different days and under different weather conditions. The quality of tomographic imaging is then assessed by evaluating the observed backscattered power fluctuations in the tomogram time series. While imaging quality is observed to degrade by mixing different days, the resulting temporal variations of the backscattered power in the canopy layer are within 1.5-dB rms in cross polarization. For this forest site, this error is translated into an AGB error of about 50-100 t/ha, which is 20% or less of forest AGB.