Investigating the Potential to Estimate Insar Penetration Depth Over Ice Sheets from Pol-Insar Data

Digital elevation models generated with SAR interferometry (InSAR) are an important information source for glacier and ice sheet mass balance. However, the measured elevations suffer from a penetration bias due to the interferometric phase center being up to several tens of meters below the surface. The penetration of the microwave signals depends on SAR parameters (e.g. frequency) and snow and ice conditions. There is potential to estimate this penetration bias directly from the data by means of polarimetric InSAR models. Existing models fail to describe the data across different test sites and ice conditions and phase centers were found to be deeper than predicted by these models. SAR tomography is employed to assess the vertical distribution of backscattering in the data from an airborne campaign. The data are compared to refined models in order to find better representations of the vertical backscattering distribution, while the model complexity is purposely kept simple to make a phase center estimation possible. Additionally, recent work showed the importance of strong subsurface layers which influence phase center depth. Combining the refined subsurface structure models and dominant subsurface layers allows simulating a variety of ice sheet subsurface scenarios and can be used to assess the potential to estimate the InSAR phase center depth directly from the data.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium

• Publication date

  2019-07-01

• Fields of study

  Geology, Computer Science, Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1109/IGARSS.2019.8900372
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Modeling Multifrequency Pol-InSAR Data From the Percolation Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet

  2019cited by this paper
• Cancellation of Dominant Scattering Layers in Greenland's Subsurface for the Characterization of Ice Volumes

  2018cited by this paper
• Sensitivity of polarimetric SAR interferometry data to different vertical subsurface structures of the Greenland ice sheet

  2017cited by this paper
• A new high-resolution elevation model of Greenland derived from TanDEM-X

  2016cited by this paper
• Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis

  2013cited by this paper
• Estimation of Glacier Ice Extinction Using Long-Wavelength Airborne Pol-InSAR

  2013cited by this paper
• InSAR Elevation Bias Caused by Penetration Into Uniform Volumes

  2007cited by this paper
• Penetration depth of interferometric synthetic‐aperture radar signals in snow and ice

  2001cited by this paper
• Penetration depths inferred from interferometric volume decorrelation observed over the Greenland Ice Sheet

  2000cited by this paper
• Polarimetric SAR Interferometryによる森林の特徴について

  2000cited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.