Snow water equivalent retrieval using spaceborne repeat-pass l-band sar interferometry over sparse vegetation covered regions

In this work, we introduce a novel InSAR processing routine for handling the low-coherence data from long temporal baseline (similar to 4 months) L-band ALOS-2 InSAR pairs in the 2016-2017 snow season over the mountainous regions of Colorado, mostly covered by sparse forest. A physical InSAR scattering model was exploited to simulate the InSAR sensitivity of SWE retrieval for forest-covered sites. InSAR-retrieved SWE results are compared with SNOTEL in-situ measurements with a correlation of 0.5 (p-value of 0.01), however, with a much shorter dynamic range of 80 mm versus the actual SWE range of 400 mm. This paper sheds light on using long temporal baseline repeat-pass L-band InSAR data for forest-covered SWE retrieval.