ANALYSIS OF FULL-POLARIMETRIC SAR MEASUREMENTS COLLECTED IN THE INTERTIDAL AREA OF SOLWAY FIRTH BY COSMO-SKYMED 2ND GENERATION MISSION

This study is to analyze the multi-polarization backscattering from intertidal areas using polarimetric synthetic aperture radar imagery collected by the X-band Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation satellite mission. In this study, we focus on the Solway Firth (Scotland) area that includes different habitats as wetland, salt marshes, sand dunes, and mudflats. In particular, mudflats presents a large variability of normalized radar cross section that may limit significantly the classification performance of intensity-based approaches. Within this context, for the first time, we exploit full-polarimetric Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation imagery collected in StripMap mode.