Permafrost Dynamics Observatory: Retrieval of Active Layer Thickness and Soil Moisture from Airborne Insar and Polsar Data
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Chen, Richard H.; Michaelides, Roger J.; Zhao, Yuhuan; Huang, Lingcao; Wig, Elizabeth; Sullivan, Taylor D.; Parsekian, Andrew D.; Zebker, Howard A.; Moghaddam, Mahta; Schaefer, Kevin M.
- Source
- 2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS , 2021 IEEE International. :1444-1447 Jul, 2021
- Subject
- Aerospace
Geoscience
Photonics and Electrooptics
Signal Processing and Analysis
Observatories
Soil measurements
Moisture measurement
Soil moisture
Radar tracking
Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar
L-band
Permafrost active layer thickness
soil moisture
radar remote sensing
InSAR
PolSAR
UAVSAR
AirMOSS
ABoVE
- Language
- ISSN
- 2153-7003
The Permafrost Dynamics Observatory (PDO) combines L-band interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) and P-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) to simultaneously estimate the seasonal thaw depth and soil moisture profile of the active layer in permafrost regions. L-band InSAR can measure seasonal subsidence due to thawing of the active layer and P-band PolSAR backscatter is sensitive to subsurface soil moisture. A joint retrieval scheme is developed as both subsidence and soil moisture are essential to accurate active layer thickness (ALT) estimation. The PDO joint retrieval has been applied to airborne L- and P-band SAR data acquired over Arctic-boreal region during the 2017 Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) airborne campaign. In this paper, we describe the forward models and joint inversion used in the PDO retrievals and compare the results with in-situ ALT and soil moisture data estimated from ground-penetrating radar (GPR).