Retrieving soil moisture below a vegetation layer using polarimetric tomographic SAR data

This paper proposes to use polarimetric tomographic synthetic aperture radar (PolTomSAR) data to spatially discriminate and characterize the ground signature under a vegetation layer. The influence of the different scattering mechanisms on the ground response is analyzed. The importance of the double-bounce is a limitation for the soil response characterization. A new algorithm is proposed to use the double bounce response to characterize the soil response and to estimate the soil moisture.