Analysis of multi-temporal land observation at C-band

The availability of reliable land cover information is crucial for a wide range of applications, like for example monitoring of land use change and land degradation as well as administrative matters in global, regional and local scales. In this paper the potential of SENTINEL-1 C-band SAR data for land cover applications, e.g. generating level-2 land cover classification products has been investigated. Therefore, the planned short revisit and dual polarization concept of SENTINEL-1 has been simulated using multi-temporal ERS-2 and ENVISAT ASAR AP C-band backscatter intensity data. For classification, several multi-temporal metrics and the minimum amount of SAR data acquired during one growing season have been analyzed to derive five basic land cover classes with accuracies greater than 85%.

1. STUDY AREA

The intention for a multi-temporal land monitoring investigation at C-band was given by the upcoming ESA's SENTINEL mission, where a series of five operational satellites will be put in space to fulfill the requirements of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) of the European Union. The first satellite is SENTINEL-1, a pair of polar orbiting synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites for the continuation of operational SAR applications and maintaining ESA's series of C-band radar missions ERS-1, ERS-2 and ENVISAT ASAR. In case of continental to global scale, land cover products derived from radar satellites seem to be marginal in comparison to land cover products derived from optical satellites, e.g. Globcover. Regional land cover mapping using radar satellite data has been successfully investigated within the tropics [1], [2] as well as in the temperate zone [3], [4] and boreal zone [5]. In the first phase of the AMOC project financed by European Space Agency, an algorithm for the classification of five basic land cover classes, namely water, grassland, agriculture, forest and settlement was developed based on multi-temporal datasets of C-band backscatter intensities and derived multi-temporal metrics.