Winter vs Summer Polarimetric Classification of Siberian Forests in X- and L-band

The paper presents the dependency of polarimetric classification of the natural land covers and, particularly, forests, on the freezing/thawing conditions. It is shown that X-band data are less dependent on the season than L-band. In L-band polarimetric classification the quantity of double-bounce and dipole-type scatterers vanishes almost totally in winter for all types of natural covers. X-band data demonstrate decreasing the number of pixels in double-bounce and dipole classes in the forest as well as increasing the area covered by the surface scattering class for freezing dates. In this study ALOS PALSAR 2006-2008 data were compared with TerraSAR-X 2014-2015 data.