Pan-boreal mapping of forest growing stock volume using hyper-temporal Envisat ASAR ScanSAR backscatter data

Retrieval of forest growing stock volume (GSV) has been shown to be feasible with C-band backscatter data using hyper-temporal stacks. In this paper, we report on the generation of pan-boreal estimates of forest GSV representative for the year 2010 using Envisat ASAR ScanSAR backscatter measurements. More than 67,000 image strips acquired between October 2009 and February 2011 over the north American and the Eurasian continent have been multi-looked to 1 km pixel size, terrain geocoded to a pixel size of 0.01 degree, speckle filtered and corrected for slope-induced effects on the backscatter. Then, GSV has been retrieved with the BIOMASAR algorithm on a pixel-by-pixel basis. First results show the strong thematic accuracy of the GSV estimates due to the very large number of backscatter observations available and retained for retrieval.