Snow Characterization at Ku-Band with a Bistatic Polarimetric Ground-Based Radar

Abstract

The Ku-band provides opportunities for investigations of snow morphology through radar observations, since it exhibits a relatively high amount of scattering even from snow layers of limited depth, while maintaining low absorption. Due to technological and practical challenges, the bistatic parameter space of Ku-band radar observations of natural media such as snow, has been relatively unexplored. We present radar measurements of snow cover obtained with KAPRI, a bistatic polarimetric Ku-band radar system. In August 2021 and March 2022, we carried out time series observations of the Aletsch glacier in the Swiss Alps, acquiring a fully-polarimetric interferometric time series of both monostatic and simultaneous bistatic observations of the glacier's accumulation zone. This dataset will serve as a test-bed to investigate new snow parameter inversion methods based on bistatic Ku-band radar data. The bistatic polarimetric measurement configuration, as well as preliminary results of the analysis of radar backscatter, are presented.