Coherence based analysis of distributed scatterers in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Abstract

In Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, permafrost is usually full of ice underground and sensitive to the temperature. So due to the global warming and seasonal change of temperature, great changes of surface in physical characteristics would occur in the temporal dimension. This could lead to the decorrelation between two SAR images, and hinder the application of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique in this area. Additionally, distributed scatterers (DS) spread all over the tundra. In this paper, we first introduce DS analytical method, and use 45 ENVISAT-ASAR images to analyze the coherence of several typical ground features. The result shows that DS analytical method could improve the accuracy of coherence estimation, mainly railway and road in our study area.