On the Observation of Water Bodies by Means of Compact Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery

Water bodies, including lakes and rivers, represent extraor-dinary sources for ecology, biodiversity, irrigation and water supply. As a matter of fact, they impact on several aspects of human, animal and vegetation living. Hence, continuous and reliable monitoring of the water bodies extent is of paramount importance and must be performed by high-quality techno-logical tools. Spaceborne detection of changes associated to natural and human-induced water dynamics is of great im-portance for ecosystem preservation, disaster warnings and water conservation projects. For this purpose, it is well estab-lished that satellite remote sensing tools represent an invalu-able source of information. Under this framework, this study focuses on the analysis of compact-polarimetric (CP) C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging modes to extract lake shoreline and, therefore, monitor the water-covered area. A reference shoreline extraction scheme is adopted for this purpose, which is feed by po-larimetric features associated to the correlation of backseat-tering channels, namely δ. The lake Athabasca in Alberta, Canada, is selected as a meaningful test site. The experimen-tal results show that the CP C-band SAR measurements can be effectively used to get lake extent information.