Operational processing of airborne P-band InSAR data for ground topography estimation

P-band interferometric SAR sensors are currently gaining a wider recognition due to their capability to penetrate vegetation coverage, thus offering the possibility to derive the ground topography of vegetated regions such as forests or agricultural areas. Aerosensing's AeS-1 airborne SAR system operates in its P-band mode at 415 MHz with a bandwidth of 70 MHz, providing data with a ground resolution of approximately 3 m. Processing of these data needs particular operations in order to face several effects inherent in the airborne repeat-pass characteristic of the sensor. Subject of this paper is the end-to-end processing chain of AeS-1 data with respect to operational ground topography estimation. Elevation measurements are validated against a high-resolution digital surface model.