Temporal Decorrelation Effect in Carbon Stocks Estimation Using Polarimetric Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolInSAR) (Case Study: Southeast Sulawesi Tropical Forest)

Abstract

Abstract. This paper was aimed to analyse the effect of temporal decorrelation in carbon stocks estimation. Estimation of carbon stocks plays important roles particularly to understand the global carbon cycle in the atmosphere regarding with climate change mitigation effort. PolInSAR technique combines the advantages of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) and Interferometry Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technique, which is evidenced to have significant contribution in radar mapping technology in the last few years. In carbon stocks estimation, PolInSAR provides information about vertical vegetation structure to estimate carbon stocks in the forest layers. Two coherence Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images of ALOS PALSAR full-polarimetric with 46 days temporal baseline were used in this research. The study was carried out in Southeast Sulawesi tropical forest. The research method was by comparing three interferometric phase coherence images affected by temporal decorrelation and their impacts on Random Volume over Ground (RvoG) model. This research showed that 46 days temporal baseline has a significant impact to estimate tree heights of the forest cover where the accuracy decrease from R 2 =0.7525 (standard deviation of tree heights is 2.75 meters) to R 2 =0.4435 (standard deviation 4.68 meters) and R 2 =0.3772 (standard deviation 3.15 meters) respectively. However, coherence optimisation can provide the best coherence image to produce a good accuracy of carbon stocks.Keywords: Temporal Decorrelation, Carbon Stocks, PolInSAR, ALOS PALSAR. Abstrak. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk meneliti pengaruh dekorelasi temporal dalam pendugaan cadangan karbon. Pendugaan cadangan karbon sangat penting untuk memahami daur karbon secara global in atmosfer terkait upaya mitigasi perubahan iklim. Teknik PolInSAR menggabungkan dua buah teknik pemetaan dengan citra Synthetic