Polarimetric Sar Interferometry (pol-insar) for Global Forest Biomass Monitoring

A central parameter to the terrestrial carbon budget is forest biomass which represents a proxy for carbon. Despite its crucial role in the terrestrial carbon budget, forest biomass is poorly quantified across most parts of the planet due to the great difficulties in measuring biomass on the ground and consistently aggregating measurements across scales. Today’s information is largely based on ground measurements on a plot basis and for many regions is still missing. Accurate and reliable estimation of forest biomass is today one of the “hot topics” within the remote sensing community. In this paper, we discuss the contribution of multi-baseline polarimetric SAR interferometry (Pol-InSAR) techniques in the context of global biomass estimation and evaluate potential space-borne mission implementations. Biomass a Function of Vertical Structure and Height The first approach in terms of structure based biomass estimation was based on the allometric relationship between biomass and forest height