Compact radar polarimetry for fire SCAR mapping and landcover classification

Compact polarimetry (compact-pol) architecture is a new hybrid mode for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and is proposed for the future Canadian Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) and the future Japanese ALOS-2 mission. The Compact-pol mode transmits single circular polarization (left/right) and receives simultaneous coherent orthogonal linear polarizations. In this paper, we use Radarsat-2 C-band quad polarization (quad-pol) data to simulate RCM compactpol data, introduce useful compact-pol parameters using compact-pol decomposition theories, and show that the compact-pol mode is capable of maintaining important polarimetric information on forest structure and changes, even though there is the loss of information through projection of the complex scattering matrix of quad-pol on a single-pixel level. Examples are given to illustrate how to use the compact decomposition parameters for forestry applications.