Simulating biomass tomographic stacks from real data on forests

This paper describes an innovative processing chain for simulating spaceborne tomographic stacks starting from real airborne stacks. This is particularly useful for testing the capabilities of forthcoming spaceborne systems when imaging complex distributed media such as tropical forests. The algorithm here proposed preserves the physical features of the scattering objects and returns tomographic stacks whose geometry of acquisition and radar parameters fit spaceborne systems. This procedure has been applied to generate simulated datasets of the forthcoming ESA 7th Earth Explorer satellite starting from airborne data gathered by the AfriSAR and TropiSAR airborne missions. Particular attention has been paid to the procedure for generating large swath starting from tiny airborne tiles. This simulator has been used to assess the impact of orbital irregularities on the quality of AGB estimates of the BIOMASS system.