Multi-dimensional airborne holographic SAR tomography reconstruction for glaciers at L-/P-band

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the processing chain for ice and glacier structures in the holographic SAR tomography (HoloSAR) mode. The algorithm is mainly based on the fast factorized back-projection (FFBP) to solve a three-dimensional space using fully polarimetric data. The motivation of HoloSAR in the cryosphere is mainly driven by recent investigations that have shown the capabilities of this mode to obtain 3-D imaging reconstructions of volumes over 360 ° at very high resolution. In this regard, a HoloSAR campaign was conducted at L-/P-band by DLR's F-SAR sensor in K-Transect, Greenland. The first experimental results of this study show a polarimetric analysis of the resulting images of a single circular flight, where the arc- and circular patterns of the 2-D images in the (x, y) plane already indicate significant wave penetration. The second part presents 3-D images obtained by the combination of the circular and vertical synthetic apertures, which enable an estimation of the vertical profile of the glacier. This mode potentially allows for a more accurate estimation of the vertical profile of ice sheets and bedrock.