Generation of large-scale forest height mosaic and forest disturbance map through the combination of spaceborne repeat-pass InSAR coherence and airborne lidar

This paper applies the forest height inversion approach developed in [1] along with the automatic mosaicking algorithm described in [2], and generates a state mosaic map for the US state of New Hampshire (NH) by utilizing the spaceborne repeat-pass ALOS/PALSAR InSAR correlation magnitude data and the airborne lidar data from NH GRANIT database over the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF). Since the forest height map for the US state of Maine (ME) has already been generated using ALOS/PALSAR InSAR data and a small strip of LVIS lidar data over the Howland forest in central Maine, a two-state mosaic, i.e., ME+NH mosaic, can be generated using the LVIS lidar strip with the GRANIT lidar data serving as a separate validation site so that the quality (e.g. error propagation) of the ME+NH mosaic map can be determined. In addition to providing the mosaic map of forest height, this forest height inversion approach is also modified to generate a forest disturbance map over the ground validation site at WMNF where ground truth (such as GRANIT lidar) data is available. The approaches along with the analysis described in this paper will serve as observing prototypes for the data fusion of future spaceborne repeat-pass InSAR missions (e.g. NASA's NISAR [3]) and lidar missions (e.g. NASA's GEDI [4]) in characterizing the large-scale forest height as well as disturbance events (e.g. selective logging and/or forest degradation).