This paper presents a methodology to process airborne interferometric SAR data to measure surface velocity fields of temperate glaciers, and applies it to data acquired over the Aletsch glacier. The first part of the paper deals with the main limitation in airborne interferometric SAR to retrieve reliable interferometric products, namely the existence of the so-called residual motion errors: inaccuracies in the order of a few centimeters in the navigation system. An extended multi-squint approach is proposed for their estimation in the case of non-stationary scenes. The second part of the paper expounds an efficient methodology to derive surface velocity fields with airborne systems, where the line-of-sight displacement is estimated using differential interferometry, and the along-track component by estimating the azimuth coregistration offsets. The necessary steps to finally obtain the 3D surface velocity field are also presented, as well as the possibility to combine different acquisition geometries. Airborne interferometric SAR data acquired by the Experimental SAR system of DLR over the Aletsch glacier, located in the Swiss Alps, are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The motion of the corner reflectors deployed in the scene is retrieved with an accuracy between 1-5 cm/day using L-band data.


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Estimation of the Surface Velocity Field of the Aletsch Glacier Using Multi-Baseline Airborne SAR Interferometry


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2009-02-01



    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Glacier Displacement Field Estimation Using Airborne SAR Interferometry

    Prats, Pau / Andres, Christian / Scheiber, Rolf et al. | German Aerospace Center (DLR) | 2007

    Free access

    Estimation of the Surface Velocity Field of Temperate Glaciers Using Airborne SAR Interferometry

    Prats, Pau / Andres, Christian / Scheiber, Rolf et al. | German Aerospace Center (DLR) | 2008

    Free access

    Multi-Pass Interferometry for Studies of Glacier Dynamics

    Mohr, J. J. | British Library Online Contents | 1997


    Glacier Motion by Radar Interferometry

    Goldstein, Richard | NTRS | 1996