The Influence of Forest Structure on Height of Scattering Phase Center

Wenjian Ni, department of geography, university of maryland, wenjian@umd.edu (Presenter)
Guoqing Sun, NASA GSFC/UMD, guoqing.sun@nasa.gov
Wenli Huang, University of Maryland, College Park, wlhuang@umd.edu

Forest canopy height is an important indicator of standing biomass for management purposes as well as for the assessment of carbon storage. Many studies have shown that the height of the InSAR scattering phase center (HSPC) of a forest canopy can be used to estimate forest height. Studies found that the scattering center at C band was near the canopy top in dense forest while it was only half of the forest height in a less dense forest stand, and that the difference between the digital elevation model from X- and P-band interferometry was correlated to the mean forest height. It was clear that the HSPC can be affected by forest structure. In this study, a coherent model was developed based on the 3-dimensional radar backscatter model of forest canopies. The coherent model was first tested by simple scenes (only forest canopy layers) and validated using SRTM DEM and national elevation data. Then the influence of forest height, forest density and tree positions on the HSPC was analyzed. The results showed that the HSPC was sensitive to forest height up to more than 50 meters. HSPC increased rapidly with forest stem density and lost sensitive to forest density after reached certain density. The effect of tree positions on HSPC was limited.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Other   (Tue 11:30 AM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Sun, Guoqing: Data Fusion Algorithms for Forest Biomass Mapping From Lidar and SAR Data ...details

Poster Location ID: 264