Abstract. The present study addresses the potential of airborne NASA – ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) compact polarimetric (CP) data to discriminate the land cover classes emphasizing the urban area for parts of Ahmedabad city, India. This has been carried out by generating m-Delta, m-Chi and m-Alpha polarimetric decompositions using Compact Polarimetric L band NISAR data. In Hybrid Polarimetric data, both m-delta and m-chi decompositions have almost the same formulations, indicating that delta and chi play the same roles as indicators of single-bounce and double-bounce scattering. However, M-delta seem preferable over M-chi as stoke parameter delta is highly susceptible towards orientation. It is also observed that building orientation and density has effect on scattering pattern. This is attributed to the target orientation which is parallel to the look direction of the sensor. Supervised classification of m-Delta decomposition was carried out and over all accuracy of 81.1 % was observed in the study.