7th Workshop on Forest Fire Management - EARSeL, European ...

Backscatter properties of x- and c-band sar in a mediterranean pine forest affected by fire 261
Fig. 1 - Scatter plot of C-band backscatter as
a function of burn severity ASAR HH, HV and
VV data from flat areas (21°-25°).
In Figure 3 mean values of SAR backscatter are reported with respect to the
local incidence angle for pseudo-plots of highly burned forest (i.e. dNBR
≥600). Keeping burn severity constant (i.e. less variability due to severity
levels) illustrated the influence of the local incidence angle on the
backscatter coefficient for a given frequency and polarization.
Fig. 2 - Scatter plots of backscatter as a
function of burn severity in flat areas (Xband).
4.2 - Backscatter for burn severity evaluation
Fig. 3 - Backscatter vs. local incidence angle
highly burned pseudo-plots (TerraSAR-X and
ASAR data).
To infer the utility of backscatter coefficient for burn severity estimation
determination coefficients (R 2 ) expressing the proportion of burn severity
variance predicted by radar backscatter are presented in Table 1 for each
sensor and polarization. The determination coefficients of were computed
using all available pseudo-plots and for 5º intervals of local incidence
angles.