Polarimetric-interferometric boreal forest scattering model for BIOMASS end-to-end simulator

A polarimetric-interferometric forward model (FM) for extended covariance matrix modeling is presented. The FM has been designed to be used within the end-to-end simulator for BIOMASS, a new ESA satellite mission aiming at the global mapping of above-ground forest biomass with P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR). The FM uses linear regression models for prediction of backscatter intensity and HH-VV correlation coefficient, and the random volume over ground (RVoG) model for the prediction of the interferometric correlation coefficients. For boreal forest, parameter values for these sub-models have been derived using polarimetric-interferometric SAR data acquired within the BioSAR 2007 campaign over the Swedish test site Remningstorp. The FM is evaluated qualitatively in a boreal forest scenario through a side-by-side comparison with BioSAR 2007 data. The general agreement is good, although there are regions with structures which cannot be reproduced by the model, probably due to insufficient forest description by the input parameters.