CHARACTERISATION OF ORIENTED VOLUMES IN GLACIER ICE AND EXTINCTION INVERSION WITH POL-INSAR

• Main Authors: Jayanti J. Sharma, Irena Hajnsek, Konstantinos P. Papathanassiou
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Svalbard; Norway; Austfonna; glacier; Ice cap
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.542.1039; http://earth.esa.int/workshops/polinsar2009/participants/63/paper_63_s9_4shar.pdf

In recent years there has been increased interest in us-ing SAR to study and monitor glaciers and ice sheets for glaciological and climate change research. This pa-per describes the estimation of ice extinctions through the modelling of Pol-InSAR coherences as a combina-tion of a surface contribution from the snow-ice interface and a volume response from an oriented particle cloud. Separation of the ground and volume contributions is ob-tained using a novel decomposition of the polarimetric covariance matrix which allows for preferential particle orientations and accounts for the influence of the dielec-tric constants of ice and snow. Ground-to-volume scatter-ing ratios derived from polarimetry are used in conjunc-tion with Pol-InSAR interferometric coherences to invert the extinction of the ice layer. Validation is performed with airborne Pol-InSAR data at L- and P-band collected using DLR’s E-SAR system over the Austfonna ice cap in Svalbard, Norway as part of the ICESAR campaign. 1.