Estimating the Interferometric Vertical Wavenumber From Range Shifts.

The estimation of the interferometric vertical wavenumber over sloped terrain is an integral step for many interferometric and tomographic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications. The state of the art for this estimation is to calculate the angle of incidence and the local terrain slope after geometric corregistration has been performed. In this letter, an alternative approach for estimating the vertical wavenumber is proposed that requires only the estimation of the range corregistration shifts. This considerably simplifies the calculation effort without compromising the estimation performance. The proposed approach is demonstrated on Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) phased array L-band synthetic aperture radar (PALSAR) data and compared against the conventional methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]