Chicken and Egg - SAR Data and Field work Data

In SAR Remote Sensing you often end up with rather chicken and egg scenarios. There is the empirical application oriented school which focuses on producing parameters like biomass and soil moisture from SAR backscatter, the other school is the electromagnetic simulation school which focuses on producing estimates of SAR backscatter from parameters gathered from fieldwork. My PhD aims to reconcile these 2 schools for dual-polarimetric SAR systems in L and X band. For all practical purposes this has become ALOS-PALSAR and TerraSAR-X data analysis. Though there is some chance of using the ProSensing PLIS system in L-band.

Forest study for biomass estimation and Soil moisture at L-band is well established due to the ERS sensors - Preliminary analysis of ERS-1 SAR for forest ecosystem studies. The same applies to C-band thanks to ENVISAT, RadarSAT etc. The use of X-band for these scenarios is relatively new and I am hoping to break new ground.

The PLIS system is currently producing bright curves from corner reflectors that everybody seems to be very excited about. Other things I am not excited about is the $1000 phone bill from few hours of internet browsing in Singapore. It looks ridiculous, 2 minutes costs some $100. I could have so easily used the freewifi from - wireless@SG. Also feasible is getting a cheap local sim, things to remember before I plug my modem in.