A comparative study of coherence patterns in C-band and L-band interferometric SAR from tropical rain forest areas

In this paper the capability of coherence patterns obtained from interferometric SAR (InSAR) for tropical rain forest monitoring are evaluated by using C-band and L-band SAR. The test site is a southern part of Sumatra Island with 50 by 50 km coverage. Several repeat-pass data pairs by JERS and ERS and tandem pairs by ERS are used to compare the coherence patterns between L-band and C-band SAR. The coherence patterns are evaluated for the following three items; coincidence with deforested areas, capability for land cover classification, and spatial frequency component. The result indicates that the capability of coherence by JERS repeat-pass pairs is almost compatible to that of coherence by ERS tandem pairs, while the capability by ERS repeat-pass pairs is relatively very poor. The result strongly supports the usefulness of the repeat-pass L-band InSAR for the purpose of tropical rain forest monitoring.