Investigate the Potential of use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for Forest Height Estimation of Sri Lanka.

Forest Cover is a Critical ecosystem component. Therefore it is real requirement to robust, easy method to monitor Forest condition frequently to better Management activities. Forest Height is an important indicator of Forest Health. Further Forest Biomass can be estimated using this forest height. Forest height retrieval is valuable for forest inventory keeping and forest regrowth monitoring also.

Satellite and Aerial Photogrammetric techniques, SAR Interferometry, LIDAR, and Land Surveying considered as spatial technologies which uses to generate accurate DSM’s(Digital Surface Models) and those products already been using for number of real world applications. InSAR (Interferometric SAR) uses this Interference of phase to derive height because it contains the information about heights perpendicular to the SAR Image plane. PolInSAR ( Polarametric Interferometric SAR) is the Combination of Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) and Interferometric SAR (InSAR) and is considered as the recent advancement which used for the Vegetation Height estimation Algorithms and several other applications.

As an initial parameter for forest biomass estimation Forest Height plays essential role thus Scientists tend to re develop existing models to derive more accurate models and validated with the high correlation between Fields measured Forest physical Parameters and derived parameters. This study attempts to examine the potential of PolInSAR free data for Forest Height estimation Procedure of Sri Lanka.