PALSAR Polarimetry - Two years experiences for calibration

Abstract:
In this paper, we introduce the performance of the PALSAR polarimetry. During the initial calibration and validation phase, PALSAR polarimetry mode was evaluated using the distributed targets and the distributed corner reflectors around the world. This mode shows an excellent performance on the radiometric and geometric performance, i.e., 9.3 meter RSS of geometric accuracy, 0.6 dB of radiometric accuracy, 0.02 dB of VV/HH amplitude difference, and 0.32 degrees of VV-HH phase difference. After this phase, we have been monitoring the performance of this mode using the corner reflector deployed in Rio Branco, Brazil. Since the L-band SAR is affected by the ionospheric instability, corner reflectors at the geomagnetic zero degrees observed by the ascending ALOS orbit are very reliable for calibration purpose.