Abstract
Abstract. The global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) resulting from the TanDEM-X mission provides information about the world topography with outstanding precision. In fact, performance analysis carried out with the already available data have shown that the global product is well within the requirements of 10 m absolute vertical accuracy and 2 m relative vertical accuracy for flat to moderate terrain. The mission's science phase took place from October 2014 to December 2015. During this phase, bistatic acquisitions with across-track separation between the two satellites up to 3.6 km at the equator were commanded. Since the relative vertical accuracy of InSAR derived elevation models is, in principle, inversely proportional to the system baseline, the TanDEM-X science phase opened the doors for the generation of elevation models with improved quality with respect to the standard product. However, the interferometric processing of the large-baseline data is troublesome due to the increased volume decorrelation and very high frequency of the phase variations. Hence, in order to fully profit from the increased baseline, sophisticated algorithms for the interferometric processing, and, in particular, for the phase unwrapping have to be considered. This paper proposes a novel dual-baseline region-growing framework for the phase unwrapping of the large-baseline interferograms. Results from two experiments with data from the TanDEM-X science phase are discussed, corroborating the expected increased level of detail of the large-baseline DEMs.
Highlights
Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is a well established remote sensing technique widely employed for the retrieval of topographic information (Bamler and Hartl, 1998; Moreira et al, 2013)
This paper presents a new approach for the generation of highly accurate Digital Elevation Model (DEM) using data from the TanDEM-X science phase
For the TanDEM-X large-baseline experiment, we propose an adapted dual-baseline region-growing algorithm first developed for airborne repeat-pass InSAR (Pinheiro et al, 2015)
Summary
Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (InSAR) is a well established remote sensing technique widely employed for the retrieval of topographic information (Bamler and Hartl, 1998; Moreira et al, 2013). In October 2014, after successfully completing the data acquisition for the construction of the standard global DEM (Zink et al, 2014, 2016), the TanDEM-X mission has entered its science phase During this phase, acquisitions with very large across-track separation between the two satellites have been performed in both pursuit monostatic and bistatic modes (Hajnsek and Busche, 2014; Buckreuss and Zink, 2016). Acquisitions with very large across-track separation between the two satellites have been performed in both pursuit monostatic and bistatic modes (Hajnsek and Busche, 2014; Buckreuss and Zink, 2016) Such configurations enable the generation of local DEMs with higher horizontal and/or vertical accuracies than the standard TanDEM-X products. The elevation models obtained from two experiments are discussed, each experiment composed of two large-baseline TanDEMX acquisitions
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