Greenland ice sheet snow facies identification approach using TanDEM-X interferometric data

This paper presents an approach for locating the different snow facies of the Greenland ice sheet by exploiting bistatic TanDEM-X interferometric SAR acquisitions. Large-scale mosaics of radar backscatter and volume decorrelation contribution, derived from the interferometric coherence, are generated from the systematic TanDEM-X interferometric acquisitions. They represent the starting point for applying a classification method based on the c-Means fuzzy clustering algorithm. The presented results have been obtained starting from a dataset of TanDEM-X acquisitions performed during winter 2010-2011. Different facies can be detected and related to the physical properties of the snow pack, showing a preliminary good agreement between the obtained results and external data of snow melting.