Seasonal subsidence induced by ground ice melt can be measured by interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) techniques to infer active layer thickness (ALT) in permafrost regions. The magnitude of subsidence depends on both how deep the soil thawed and how much ice/water content existed in the active layer soil. To provide the later, P-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) backscatter is used due to its sensitivity to subsurface soil moisture and freeze/thaw conditions. In this study, which is the second in a two-part series of Permafrost Dynamics Observatory (PDO), we exploit L-band InSAR subsidence and P-band PolSAR backscatter in a joint retrieval scheme to simultaneously estimate ALT and soil moisture profile of permafrost active layer. Both subsidence and backscatter are explicitly characterized by physics-based models and share a common set of soil parameters including porosity and water saturation profiles. The PDO joint retrieval has been applied to the L- and P-band SAR data acquired by National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Jet Propulsion Laboratory 's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar over Alaska and western Canada during the 2017 Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) airborne campaign. This high-resolution (30 m) regional estimates of ALT and soil moisture profile spanning over the ABoVE study domain can help link the ground-based field surveys with satellite observations to further understand the permafrost and active layer soil process dynamics to disturbances and climate change occurring across the northern circumpolar region.
To confirm the presence of water on the moon, many scientists of the world are making continuous efforts through remote sensing data of different missions. In this direction, the Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR) sensor of the Chandrayaan-2 mis-sion adds a very important chapter which is the world's first Planetary SAR mission of fully polarimetric capability with L-and S-band. This study utilizes the L-band fully polarimetric DFSAR data of Chandrayaan-2 mission for the PolSAR parameters-based analysis and ice detection in permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the lunar South Polar craters. The PSR IDs SP_875930_3125710, SP_837670_3387710, and SP_874930_3578760 of the lunar South Pole were selected for the polarimetric analysis using DFSAR L -band. Based on previous studies ((Li et al., 2018), two out of three PSR Ids (SP_875930_3125710 and SP_874930_3578760) were easy to identify for surface ice. That is why only two PSR IDs were used for polarimetric SAR analysis of DFSAR data for surface ice char-acterization and detection. The hybrid polarimetric simulation was also performed to the fully polarimetric L-band data to study stokes vectors and associated child parameters for the selected study area. The analysis of polarimetric distortions confirms the persistence of the polarimetric quality of the SAR data and for this, the polarimetric distortion analysis was performed with co-pol and cross-pol chan-nels. Wave dichotomy-based Huynen decomposition and Barnes decomposition models were implemented to the fully polarimetric quad-pol DFSAR data. The eigenvalue-eigenvector-based decomposition model was also implemented to characterize the scattering behavior of the PSRs. A high correlation was obtained between Circular Polarization Ratio (CPR), entropy, and alpha for the 200 hundred points randomly collected from the image. Diversity index also showed a high positive correlation with CPR. The polarimetric quality of the data was evaluated with the scatterplot between the cross-polarimetric channels and it was observed that the L-band quad-pol data of DFSAR satisfies the criteria for PolSAR data of a monostatic SAR system. Analysis of the results obtained from the polarimetric SAR data indicated that the high volumetric scattering and CPR for the PSR ID SP_875930_3125710 may be due to ice clusters within the permanently shadowed region. Polarimetric analysis of the PSR (SP_874930_3578760) at Howarth Crater using L-band DFSAR data shows a low amount of volumetric scattering and a low CPR for most locations in the PSR. The different ranges of CPR and volume scattering for both craters indicate that polarimetric parameters and indices should be studied in conjunction with geomorphological parameters of the lunar surface, for unambiguous identification of surface ice clusters in the PSR. (c) 2022 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.