KaRIn on SWOT: Characteristics of Near-Nadir Ka-Band Interferometric SAR Imagery

The principal instrument of the NASA/CNES wide-swath altimetry mission Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) is the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn), a bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system operating on near-nadir swaths on both sides of the satellite track. There are limited reports on backscattering from natural surfaces at this short wavelength and particular observation geometry. Near-field backscattering measurements on water, as well as the first interferometric airborne SAR acquisitions at Ka-band covering the 0.6 °-3.9 ° incidence range of KaRIn, were therefore conducted. The experimental results confirm expected characteristics of near-nadir Ka-band interferometric SAR imagery, such as strong water/land radiometric contrast (typically in the order of 10 dB) and very high interferometric coherence on water.

[1]  Shannon T. Brown,et al.  Ka-band SAR interferometry studies for the SWOT mission , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[2]  Bertrand Chapron,et al.  Ocean Wave Slope Observations Using Radar Backscatter and Laser Altimeters , 2004 .

[3]  Javier Duro,et al.  KaRIn on SWOT: modeling and simulation of near-nadir Ka-band interferometric SAR images , 2010, Remote Sensing.

[4]  Frédéric Galland,et al.  Minimum description length synthetic aperture radar image segmentation , 2003, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[5]  Kamal Sarabandi,et al.  Measurement and modeling of the millimeter-wave backscatter response of soil surfaces , 1996, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[6]  Xiaoqing Wu,et al.  Near nadir Ka-band sar interferometry: SWOT airborne experiment , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[7]  Delwyn Moller,et al.  Near‐Nadir Ka‐band Field Observations of Freshwater Bodies , 2014 .

[8]  F. Ulaby,et al.  Handbook of radar scattering statistics for terrain , 1989 .

[9]  Fuk K. Li,et al.  Synthetic aperture radar interferometry , 2000, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[10]  Jean-Claude Souyris,et al.  Radar signal retrodiffusion by water surface , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[11]  Ishuwa C. Sikaneta,et al.  Estimating the effective number of looks in interferometric SAR data , 2002, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[12]  Florence Tupin,et al.  Extraction of water surfaces in simulated Ka-band SAR images of KaRIn on swot , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[13]  E. Rodríguez,et al.  Theory and design of interferometric synthetic aperture radars , 1992 .

[14]  Alain Mallet,et al.  KaRIn - the Ka-band radar interferometer on SWOT: Measurement principle, processing and data specificities , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[15]  Simone Tanelli,et al.  Simultaneous measurements of ku- and ka-band sea surface cross sections by an airborne Radar , 2006, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters.

[16]  Steven P. Neeck,et al.  Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission , 2012, Remote Sensing.

[17]  Delwyn Moller,et al.  The Glacier and Land Ice Surface Topography Interferometer: An Airborne Proof-of-Concept Demonstration of High-Precision Ka-Band Single-Pass Elevation Mapping , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[18]  Jocelyn Chanussot,et al.  River network detection on simulated swot images based on curvilinear denoising and morphological detection , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.