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Spaceborne SAR Data Processing and Its Application in Forest Biophysical Parameter Mapping and Change Monitoring

A special issue of Remote Sensing (ISSN 2072-4292). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2024 | Viewed by 750

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
National Space Science Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Interests: advanced radar remote-sensing techniques (such as SAR, InSAR, polarimetric InSAR, and SAR tomography) for mapping environmental resources (primarily vegetation, snow, ice, and planetary sub-surface); applied electromagnetics modeling and simulation for the earth and planetary remote-sensing applications

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Guest Editor
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
Interests: remote-sensing measurement of biophysical attributes of tropical forests by combining biological and electromagnetic modeling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
Interests: microwave sensor development and implementation; numerical modeling of electromagnetic fields within natural media; signal and image processing applied to environmental remote sensing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)-derived large-scale high-resolution products of forest biophysical parameters (such as forest aboveground biomass and height) are critical variables for quantifying the global terrestrial carbon storage and modeling the dynamics of the carbon cycle. Modern spaceborne SARs have the advantage of wall-to-wall mapping such parameters at high spatial and temporal resolution with wide-swath coverage and all-weather day/night observing capability. Furthermore, most of the advanced spaceborne SAR sensors are equipped with multi-mode observations, such as Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR), Interferometric SAR (InSAR), Polarimetric InSAR (PolInSAR), and Tomographic SAR (TomoSAR), all of which in combination provide multi-dimensional information of forest structure and/or biophysical parameters.

This Special Issue aims to solicit original articles on advanced spaceborne SAR data processing methods with an emphasis on their applications in forest biophysical parameter mapping and change monitoring, which include, but are not limited to:

  • Advanced data processing methods of modern spaceborne SAR data, such as JAXA's ALOS/ALOS-2/ALOS-4, ESA’s Sentinel-1, DLR's TanDEM-X, China’s Gaofen series and bistatic L-SAR, ESA's BIOMASS, and NASA'S NISAR;
  • Novel inversion algorithms for determining the status and change of vegetation vertical structure and forest biophysical parameters (e.g., aboveground biomass and height) through the use of advanced spaceborne SAR-based approaches, as well as auxiliary data from other types of sensor such as lidar and/or optical data;
  • Algorithms for creating large-scale products of forest biophysical parameters as well as their changes over various terrestrial biomes with different climate/weather conditions;
  • New electromagnetic scattering models for interpreting and simulating SAR observations of forests;
  • Recent progress in airborne radar campaigns as well as field inventory experiments for different types of forest in support of the cal/val activities for spaceborne SAR missions.

Prof. Dr. Yang Lei
Dr. Robert Treuhaft
Prof. Dr. Paul Siqueira
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • spaceborne SAR
  • InSAR
  • PolSAR
  • PolInSAR
  • TomoSAR
  • forest biophysical parameter
  • forest aboveground biomass
  • forest height
  • radar lidar fusion
  • radar optical fusion
  • large-scale product

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

19 pages, 11782 KiB  
Article
Forest 3D Radar Reflectivity Reconstruction at X-Band Using a Lidar Derived Polarimetric Coherence Tomography Basis
by Roman Guliaev, Matteo Pardini and Konstantinos P. Papathanassiou
Remote Sens. 2024, 16(12), 2146; https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16122146 - 13 Jun 2024
Viewed by 394
Abstract
Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) allows the reconstruction of the 3D radar reflectivity of forests from a large(r) number of multi-angular acquisitions. However, in most practical implementations it suffers from limited vertical resolution and/or reconstruction artefacts as the result of non-ideal acquisition setups. [...] Read more.
Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) allows the reconstruction of the 3D radar reflectivity of forests from a large(r) number of multi-angular acquisitions. However, in most practical implementations it suffers from limited vertical resolution and/or reconstruction artefacts as the result of non-ideal acquisition setups. Polarisation Coherence Tomography (PCT) offers an alternative to traditional tomographic techniques that allow the reconstruction of the low-frequency 3D radar reflectivity components from a small(er) number of multi-angular SAR acquisitions. PCT formulates the tomographic reconstruction problem as a series expansion on a given function basis. The expansion coefficients are estimated from interferometric coherence measurements between acquisitions. In its original form, PCT uses the Legendre polynomial basis for the reconstruction of the 3D radar reflectivity. This paper investigates the use of new basis functions for the reconstruction of X-band 3D radar reflectivity of forests derived from available lidar waveforms. This approach enables an improved 3D radar reflectivity reconstruction with enhanced vertical resolution, tailored to individual forest conditions. It also allows the translation from sparse lidar waveform vertical reflectivity information into continuous vertical reflectivity estimates when combined with interferometric SAR measurements. This is especially relevant for exploring the synergy of actual missions such as GEDI and TanDEM-X. The quality of the reconstructed 3D radar reflectivity is assessed by comparing simulated InSAR coherences derived from the reconstructed 3D radar reflectivity against measured coherences at different spatial baselines. The assessment is performed and discussed for interferometric TanDEM-X acquisitions performed over two tropical Gabonese rainforest sites: Mondah and Lopé. The results demonstrate that the lidar-derived basis provides more physically realistic vertical reflectivity profiles, which also produce a smaller bias in the simulated coherence validation, compared to the conventional Legendre polynomial basis. Full article
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