Snow Permittivity and Density Estimation Using C-Band Dual Polarimetric Sentinel-1A Data

This paper focuses on remote sensing of Radar Polarimetry to determine the snow geophysical parameters particularly snow dielectric constant and snow density in the North Sikkim region of India. The analysis utilizes the dual-polarimetric C-band of Sentinel-1A (VH&VV) synthetic aperture radar data, field observation, and other ancillary information for the retrieval of snowpack dielectric and snow density. Physical Optics Model (POM) for surface scattering-based inversion model has been employed and the C2 matrix components of both VH and VV polarization and incidence angle are given as input to develop the algorithm. The algorithm gives the snow dielectric constant which can further be related to snow density using Looyenga's semi-empirical formula. The field value of snow density in the study zone has been compared to the algorithm-estimated snow density and the root means the squared error is observed to be 0.1973.