Monitoring forest above-ground biomass from multifrequency vegetation optical depth: a preliminary study

Vegetation Optical Depth (VOD) is highly sensitive to Above-ground Biomass (AGB), particularly at L-band, as this band is more sensitive to the canopy layer and has greater ca pacity to penetrate the vegetation. However, higher frequen cies, such as C- and X-bands are more related to smaller veg etation structures. Then a combination of these three bands is expected to be relevant to accurate AGB retrievals. This study presents a comparison of three VOD products at three bands and evaluates the performance of a multi-frequency VOD combination by applying a Principal Component Re gression (PCR) to Forest biomass. Results show that L-band VOD captures the 84% of the biomass and the PCR is built, mainly, for this band meaning that higher frequencies do not contribute substantially to the AGB retrieval in this study, still they do not affect the retrievals negatively.
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (author's final draft)