A comparative study of coherence patterns in C-band and L-band interferometric SAR from tropical rain forest areas Original Research Article

In this paper the capability of coherence patterns obtained from interferometric SAR (InSAR) for tropical rain forest monitoring are evaluated by using C-band and L-band SAR. The test site is a southern part of Sumatra Island with 50 by 50 km coverage. Several repeat-pass data pairs by JERS and ERS and tandem pairs by ERS are used to compare the coherence patterns between L-band and C-band SAR. The coherence patterns are evaluated for the following three items; coincidence with deforested areas, capability for land cover classification, and spatial frequency component. The result indicates that the capability of coherence by JERS repeat-pass pairs is almost compatible to that of coherence by ERS tandem pairs, while the capability by ERS repeat-pass pairs is relatively very poor. The result strongly supports the usefulness of the repeat-pass L-band InSAR for the purpose of tropical rain forest monitoring.