Retrieval of Soil Surface Parameters via Helicopter-Borne P-Band Polarimetric SAR Data Acquired Along Antiparallel Flight Tracks

The retrieval of soil moisture and surface roughness from P-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data is here addressed. In particular, the presented methodology is based on the Polarimetric Two Scale Model (PTSM) recently proposed in the literature, and exploits the combination of SAR data collected along two antiparallel flight-tracks flown on the same area with a very short revisit time. Some considerations about the effects of the SAR acquisition geometry on the retrieval results are also provided. The used dataset is relevant to a desert campaign carried out in 2018 with the helicopter-borne P-band SAR system owned by the Italian Space Agency