Glacier Facies Detection Using Fully Polarimetric Sar Data with Six Component Scattering Model Based Decomposition Method

Glaciers are an important indicator of climatic fluctuations. Deviations in the glacier zones (wet snow facies or ice facies) have been seen as good indicators of climatic variations. However, identification/extraction of glacier zones is still a challenging task. The purpose of this study is to develop a method using six-component scattering model based decomposition (6SD) in combination with maximum likelihood classifier (MLC) for recognizing scattering variations in different glacier zones from fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar. Proposed method is implemented on Advanced Land Observing Satellite/Phased-array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS/PALSAR) data over Samudra Tapu glacier, Himachal Pradesh, India.