Proposal of wet snowmapping with focus on incident angle influential to depolarization of surface scattering

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an effective wet snow mapping method with focus on the incident angle of microwave. Surface scattering is dominant for both wet snow and bare ground. However, it is expected that the characteristic of the wet snow scattering is different from the bare ground one according to the variation of dielectric constant. At the same time, surface scattering characteristics, especially depolarization, also depend on the incident angle. First, we evaluate numerically the degree of polarization of horizontal incident wave as an example with a simplified integral equation model (IEM). We also examine real data of full polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR). The results shows that the degree of polarization depends on the difference of incident angles rather that of dielectric constants. Then we conduct wet-snow mapping by supervised learning with teacher areas for large / small incident angles and snow / bare ground. The mapping result agrees well with the estimation by optical data. It is found important to take into account the incident angle in snow mapping.