Correlations between forest biomass and full polarimetric parameters derived from Pi-SAR-L2 data for a site in Riau, Indonesia

Correlations between forest biomass and full polarimetric parameters, including  0 , four-component decomposition, eigenvalue decomposition (entropy/alpha/anisotropy), and coherence values between polarization were analyzed. Polarimetric and interferometric airborne synthetic aperture radar with L-band type-2 (Pi-SAR-L2) data were examined to identify prospective parameters for estimating the above ground biomass (AG-biomass) of a dense forest in the Riau province of Indonesia. The  0 AG-biomass curve showed saturation at ~100 tons/ha. In contrast, several full polarimetric parameters such as entropy and coherence between polarizations () showed correlations up to 200 tons/ha. Similar results were derived in the Peruvian Amazon, where PALSAR (phased array type L-band synthetic aperture radar) /full polarimetric data were analyzed. A  of 0.2, which was observed for the high biomass area, was almost at noise level. Larger entropies observed for the higher biomass areas imply that more randomness was introduced in the scattering mechanism. These results indicate that the L-band SAR signal observed over higher biomass areas is approaching the random signal level.