Gutierrez Lopez, Jose
- Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar missions have the potential to estimate forest vegetation water content (VWC), but understanding the underlying scattering processes and their link to VWC is still limited. In this article, tower-based tomographic radar observations of a boreal forest at L-band are used to measure canopy-only backscatter. Results show that the latter is anticorrelated with stem water content. Time series of both canopy backscatter and attenuation were extracted and linked to in situ stem water content using a scattering model. Results show that the proposed canopy backscatter model effectively captures the diurnal and long-term variations in stem water content, with an RMSE of 4%. The estimated model coefficients indicate that the sensitivity of extinction to stem water content dominates over the sensitivity of volume backscatter to stem water content. Moreover, the attenuation time series and corresponding model resulted in a better agreement with an RMSE of 2%. However, attenuation requires a known concealed reference target in the forest which limits its use over extended areas. While the study is limited in scope and the model has not been validated for broader generalization, these findings offer preliminary insights into the sensitivity of L-band radar to forest VWC and may support future observational strategies.
Keywords
Backscatter; Forestry; Poles and towers; Biological system modeling; Spaceborne radar; Sensors; Time series analysis; L-band; Trees (botanical); Scattering; Boreal forest; forest backscatter; stem water content (StWC); vegetation water content (VWC)
Published in
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
2026, volume: 19, pages: 3477-3487
Publisher: IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Earth Observation
Forest Science
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2025.3650660
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/146210