Polarimetric 3-D imaging with airborne holographic SAR tomography over glaciers

This paper presents an assessment of the backscattering of glaciers in the holographic SAR tomography (HoloSAR) mode. The motivation of HoloSAR in the cryosphere is mainly driven by recent investigations in the biosphere that have shown the capabilities of this mode to reconstruct volumes with 3-D imaging reconstructions over 360 ° at very high resolution. To that end, an HoloSAR campaign was conducted at L-band by the DLR´s F-SAR sensor over the Findel glacier, Monte Rosa, Switzerland. The first part of this study shows a polarimetric analysis of the resulting images of a single circular flight, where the arc- and circular patterns of the 2-D images in the (x, y) plane already indicate wave penetration. The second part presents 3-D images obtained by the combination of the circular and vertical synthetic apertures, which enable an estimation of the vertical profile of snow, ice sheets and bedrock.