Remote sensing of earth terrain

Abstract

In remote sensing, the encountered geophysical media such as agricultural canopy, forest, snow, or ice are inhomogeneous and contain scatters in a random manner. Furthermore, weather conditions such as fog, mist, or snow cover can intervene the electromagnetic observation of the remotely sensed media. In the modelling of such media accounting for the weather effects, a multi-layer random medium model has been developed. The scattering effects of the random media are described by three-dimensional correlation functions with variances and correlation lengths corresponding to the fluctuation strengths and the physical geometry of the inhomogeneities, respectively. With proper consideration of the dyadic Green's function and its singularities, the strong fluctuation theory is used to calculate the effective permittivities which account for the modification of the wave speed and attenuation in the presence of the scatters. The distorted Born approximation is then applied to obtain the correlations of the scattered fields. From the correlation of the scattered field, calculated is the complete set of scattering coefficients for polarimetric radar observation or brightness temperature in passive radiometer applications. In the remote sensing of terrestrial ecosystems, the development of microwave remote sensing technology and the potential of SAR to measure vegetation structure and biomass have increased effort to conduct experimental and theoretical researches on the interactions between microwave and vegetation canopies. The overall objective is to develop inversion algorithms to retrieve biophysical parameters from radar data. In this perspective, theoretical models and experimental data are methodically interconnected in the following manner: Due to the complexity of the interactions involved, all theoretical models have limited domains of validity; the proposed solution is to use theoretical models, which is validated by experiments, to establish the region in which the radar response is most sensitive to the parameters of interest; theoretically simulated data will be used to generate simple invertible models over the region. For applications to the remote sensing of sea ice, the developed theoretical models need to be tested with experimental measurements. With measured ground truth such as ice thickness, temperature, salinity, and structure, input parameters to the theoretical models can be obtained to calculate the polarimetric scattering coefficients for radars or brightness temperature for radiometers and then compare theoretical results with experimental data. Validated models will play an important role in the interpretation and classification of ice in monitoring global ice cover from space borne remote sensors in the future. We present an inversion algorithm based on a recently developed inversion method referred to as the Renormalized Source-Type Integral Equation approach. The objective of this method is to overcome some of the limitations and difficulties of the iterative Born technique. It recasts the inversion, which is nonlinear in nature, in terms of the solution of a set of linear equations; however, the final inversion equation is still nonlinear. The derived inversion equation is an exact equation which sums up the iterative Neuman (or Born) series in a closed form and, thus, is a valid representation even in the case when the Born series diverges; hence, the name Renormalized Source-Type Integral Equation Approach