Processing of Envisat Asar Wide Swath Imagery for Derivation of Biophysical Parameters of Siberian Forest - a Contribution of the German Aerospace Center to the Siberia-ii Project

RESUME Wide swath imagery of the ENVISAT Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) may be used to study and map biophysical parameters of the Siberian forest. Within this study multi incidence-angle capacities of the ASAR Wide Swath (WS) mode for deriving forest types and biomass parameters are assessed. For this purpose a processing chain was set up to manage orthorectify, calibrate and analyse large numbers of WS-imagery in an automated way. The geocoding is based on DLRs EGEO system, deriving highly consistent geometrically corrected imagery as well as incidence angle matrices. Calibration to backscatter values is implemented according to ESAs standard calibration procedures published for ENVISAT ASAR. After applying all required preprocessing and calibration, incidence angle signatures of different forest types and biomass classes are generated and studied to assess biophysical parameters of the Siberian forest.