Forest biomass mapping from lidar and radar synergies

1 FOREST BIOMASS MAPPING FROM LIDAR AND RADAR SYNERGIES 2 Guoqing Sun, K. Jon Ranson, Z. Guo, Z. Zhang, P. Montesano and D. Kimes 3 4 Dept. of Geography, University of Maryland, College Park, MD USA, [email protected] 5 Biospheric Sciences Branch, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD USA 6 State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing, Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P. 7 O. Box 9718, Beijing, 100101, China 8 School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, No. 19, Xinjiekouwai Street, Beijing 100875, P. R. China 9 Science Systems and Applications, Inc., 10210 Greenbelt Rd Lanham, MD 20706, USA 10 11 Lidar and Radar sensors use transmitted and received electromagnetic radiation to measure forest canopies. The 12 combined use of lidar and radar instruments to measure forest structure attributes such as height and biomass at global 13 scales is being considered for a future Earth Observation satellite missions. Large footprint lidar makes a direct 14 measurement of the distance of canopy scattering elements (i.e., leaves, branches, ground) within the illuminated area 15 and can yield accurate information about the vertical profile of the canopy within these lidar. Synthetic Aperture Radar 16 (SAR) is known to sense the forest canopy volume, especially at longer radar wavelengths and provides image data. 17 Methods for biomass mapping by a combination of lidar sampling and radar mapping need to be developed since neither 18 can do the whole job individually. 19