A Multi-Frequency SAR Tomographic Characterization of Sub-Surface Ice Volumes

Kurzfassung

The application of SAR Tomography (TomoSAR) to ice bodies is in a rather early stage, essentially due to the limited amount of experimental and validation data. In order to contribute to fill this gap, the objective of this paper is to present first results in the characterization of the 3-D backscattered signal of ice volumes at different frequencies. Exploiting the validation data collected on ground, experiments are carried out to identify different kind of scatterers, and to analyse their behaviour across the polarimetric channels. In particular, a methodology to detect the presence of differential extinction effects is proposed and tested. Accordingly, scattering model as-sumptions and requirements for the inversion of physical structure parameters are discussed. The experimental analysis is carried out by processing multibaseline SAR data acquired by DLR in the IceSAR 2007 and ARCTIC 15 campaigns.