Comparison of L and C band Polarimetric SAR Data for the Retrieval of Soil Moisture in Alpine Areas

This work is developed in the framework of the SOFIA project (ESA AO-6280) which aims at estimating important biophysical variables in the Alpine area by using advanced state of the art retrieval methods in combination with new generation satellite polarimetric SAR data. As a first analysis in this direction, in a previous contribution we investigated the effectiveness of fully polarimetric RADARSAT2 C-band SAR data and proposed the use of the Support Vector Regression technique and the integration of additional information on the investigated area obtained from ancillary data. In this paper we move the attention on the exploitation of L-band SAR data. In more detail, our analysis aims at: 1) assessing the effectiveness of the proposed retrieval algorithm with different satellite SAR data, namely the L-band data; 2) comparing the estimates obtained with the use of C- and L-band SAR imagery, in order to understand common patterns and eventually discrepances due to the different penetrat...