Pol-InSAR Results from ALOS-PalSAR

The launch of JAXA's ALOS in January 2006 provides - for the fist time since the SIR-C/X-SAR mission's in the 80's - the opportunity to acquire Pol-InSAR data from space. Indeed, PalSAR (i.e. the SAR instrument onboard of ALOS) is able to operate in a quad-pol mode - declared by JAXA as an "experimental mode" - that allows the acquisition of Pol-InSAR data in a repeat- pass mode. In this sense, ALOS-PalSAR allows the application, validation and development of Pol-InSAR inversion techniques on a much wider range of sites distributed world-wide and accessible to a much wider scientific user community than possible with airborne sensors. In this paper we present the analysis of fully- and/or dual-polarimetric and interferometric data sets acquired by ALOS/PalSAR during its CAL-VAL and operational data acquisition phase and discuss the potential and the limitations for different polarimetric interferometric applications. More developed applications as forest height estimation from single- and multi-baseline Pol-InSAR ALOS-PalSAR data inversion - addressed in the frame of JAXA's Karbon & Kyoto initiative - as well as novel applications regarding soherent scatterer's detection and interpretation in urban environments are discussed. The impact of critical mission and operation design parameters as spatial coverage, repeat-pass time, observation scenario, and orbit control are evaluated and discussed.