Mean TerraSAR-X backscatter and in-situ measurements of near surface soil moisture and temperature including vegetation survey in August 2015 on central Yamal (Vaskiny Dachi CALM site)

So far, the potential of such data for estimating ALT has not been explored. We therefore investigated the relationship between ALT and X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter of TerraSAR-X (averages for 10 × 10 m window) in order to examine the possibility of delineating ALT with continuous and larger spatial coverage in this area and compare it to the already-established method of using NDVI from Landsat (30 m).

Our results show that the mutual dependency of ALT and TerraSAR-X backscatter on land cover types suggests a connection of both parameters. A range of 5 dB can be observed for an ALT range of 100 cm (40-140 cm), and an R² of 0.66 has been determined over the calibration sites. An increase of ALT with increasing backscatter can be determined.

The root mean square error (RMSE) over a comparably heterogeneous validation site with maximum ALT of > 150 cm is 20 cm. Deviations are larger for measurement locations with mixed vegetation types (especially partial coverage by cryptogam crust) with respect to the spatial resolution of the satellite data.