A study of the use of COSMO-SkyMed SAR PingPong polarimetric mode for rice growth monitoring

The sensitivity of COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) incoherent dual-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to the rice growth cycle is investigated here. State-of-the-art scattering models are used, together with a time series of 24 CSK SAR images collected in Mekong Delta, Vietnam in 2014, to interpret the behaviour of multi-polarization features with respect to the different phenological stages that characterize rice growth. Experimental results show the multi-polarization features sensitivity with respect to rice growth cycle and witness that a joint use of the co-polarized channels (i.e. co-polarized ratio or correlation between co-polarized channels) allows identifying scattering behaviours that are compatible with four stages of the rice growth cycle.