ALOS PALSAR Calibration and Validation Results from Sweden

Abstract

In 2006 calibration activities for ALOS PALSAR were conducted in Sweden. Four five-metre trihedral corner reflectors and three smaller dihedral reflectors were deployed and operated during eight months. 23 PALSAR scenes were acquired over the calibration site allowing an evaluation of the quality and temporal stability of the data. Results show that the co-polarized data have been stable during the whole calibration period with variations in the trihedral responses lower than 0.7 dB. The measured resolution in azimuth was 4.4 m and in slant range 4.7 m for single polarization images and 9.5 m for polarimetric data. For the cross-polarized data large variations in the dihedral responses were found. It is assumed that this is caused by a larger sensitivity to pointing errors. For the polarimetric data, estimation of Faraday rotation gave values ranging from 0.1deg to 3deg.