Speckle-Related Parameters to Monitor Water Area Coverage of Salty Ponds

This study is to discuss the ability of full-resolution, i.e., speckled, Sentinel-1 single-look-complex (SLC) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to monitor water-area coverage of salt ponds. Three scenarios are considered: 1) completely filled of water, 2) empty, 3) intermediate. The metric adopted to track the pond water area evolution is based on the speckle statistics and, in particular, on the departure from the fully developed speckle model.Experiments, performed using a time-series of Sentinel-1 SAR imagery collected over the salt pond "Sale ’e Porcus", Sardinia, Italy, show that Normalized Intensity Moments (NIMs) allow a good separation between the three cases under different wind conditions.