The Penetration Analysis of Airborne Ku-Band Radar Versus Satellite Infrared Lidar Based on the Height and Energy Percentiles in the Boreal Forest

Abstract

The paper investigates the penetration properties of an airborne Ku-band frequency modulated continuous waveform (FMCW) profiling radar named Tomoradar and a satellite near-infrared lidar into the boreal forest of Finland. We achieve the accumulative energy distributions based on the Tomoradar waveforms and the satellite lidar waveforms generated from the high-density airborne lidar data within Tomoradar footprints. By comparing two groups of the height percentiles and energy percentiles derived from the accumulative energy distributions, we evaluate the relationship of penetrations between the Ku-band microwave and near-infrared laser according to the coefficients of the determination (COD), and the root mean square errors (RMSE) of linear regression analyses. The quantitative analysis results demonstrate that the height and energy percentiles derived from Tomoradar waveforms correlate well with those from satellite lidar waveforms with the mean correlation coefficients of more than 0.78 and 0.85. The linear regression models for the height and energy percentile produce excellent fits with the mean CODs of 0.95 and 0.90 and the mean RMSEs of 1.25 m and 0.03, respectively. Less than 15% of height percentiles and 87.54% of the energy percentiles in the sixth stratum near the ground derived from Tomoradar waveforms surpass those from satellite lidar waveforms. Hence, the Ku-band microwave can penetrate deeper into the forest than the near-infrared laser at the same spatial scale. In addition, quadratic fitting models are established to describe the differences of the height percentile (DHP) and the energy percentile (DEP) to expound the canopy height and closure contributions numerically. The facts that the CODs of the DHP and DEP individually are more than 0.96 and 0.89 and the fitting residual histograms approximate to normal distributions reveal the reliabilities of the proposed fitting models. Thus, the penetration analyses are valid for the explorations on the FMCW radar applications and the data fusion of the Ku-band radar and near-infrared lidar in the forest investigations.