Measuring the roughness characteristics of natural surfaces at pixel scales: moving from 1 metre to 25 metre profiles

摘要

This paper describes the motivation behind and the characteristics of a laser profiler which has been specifically tailored to the measurement of surface roughness characteristics of importance in the radar electromagnetic scattering studies-and hence inversion and retrieval algorithms. The main feature of this profiler is its capability of recording roughness profiles at the scale of the spaceborne SAR resolution, which is roughly of the order of 25 meters for current radar satellites such as ERS-2 or RADARSAT.