Assessing SAR tomography BIOMASS retrieval method at a mountainous tropical forest

Abstract

The 7-th ESA Earth Explorer, BIOMASS is a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) which will collect data from employing a multiple baseline orbit during the initial phase of its lifetime. This data can be used for tomographic SAR (TomoSAR) processing resulting in a vertical resolution of about 20 m, sufficient to decompose the backscatter from most tropical forests into two to three layers. A recent study using airborne data from the TropiSAR campaign at the site of Paracou, French Guiana, showed that this information significantly improves the retrieval of forest above-ground biomass (AGB), resulting in an accuracy of about 10% of AGB at a resolution of 1.5-ha. In this paper, we generalize this result, by applying the same algorithm to the Nouragues test site in central French Guiana. This site is characterized by a hilly terrain and an AGB ranging from 150 to 600 t/ha. The relationship between AGB and TomoSAR data at Nouragues was found to be highly similar to the one observed at Paracou. We found that the best correlation between the backscatter signal and AGB is held in the upper canopy layer (i.e. 20-40 m). Cross validation using training plots from Nouragues and validation plots from Paracou, and vice versa, resulted in an accuracy of about 16%-18% of AGB using 1-ha plots. This result suggests that the TomoSAR AGB retrieval method is generalizable to other study sites. In addition we show that, TomoSAR can be used to estimate the canopy height with an error of less than 4 m with forest height ranging from 20 m-40 m.