Tandem-L forest parameter performance analysis

Abstract

Tandem-L is a satellite mission being currently studied at DLR. It foresees the deployment of two L-band SAR platforms that will fly in close formation enabling bistatic operations. The mission is intended to serve a number of different science objectives with applications in the lithosphere, biosphere and cryosphere. The variety of applications and their competition for the use of the system require that we develope performance models suitable for system and mission design. In this paper we present the main concepts developed for height structure retrieval and performance characterization considering the combination of single pass acquisitions. We use the Cramer-Rao bound for a layered model and we study the impact of the baseline number and distribution. We also describe simulations with the Covariance Matching and Polarization Coherence Tomography techniques and argue in favor of better modeling for forest vertical structure in the case of limited number of obervations.