Monitoring Surface Phenomena Created by an Underground Chemical Explosion Using Fully Polarimetric VideoSAR

Journal Article · Thu Dec 20 00:00:00 EST 2018 · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2018.2873979· OSTI ID:1499698

Yocky, David A. ^[1]; West, R. Derek ^[1]; Riley, Robert M. ^[1]; Calloway, Terry M. ^[1]

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1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Sandia National Laboratories flew its Facility for Advanced RF and Algorithm Development X-Band (9.6-GHz center frequency), fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) in VideoSAR mode to collect complex-valued SAR imagery before, during, and after the sixth Source Physics Experiment's (SPE-6) underground explosion. The VideoSAR products generated from the data sets include "movies'' of single- and quad-polarization coherence maps, magnitude imagery, and polarimetric decompositions. Residual defocus, due to platform motion during data acquisition, was corrected with a digital elevation model-based autofocus algorithm. We generated and exploited the VideoSAR image products to characterize the surface movement effects caused by the underground explosion. Unlike seismic sensors, which measure local area seismic waves using sparse spacing and subterranean positioning, these VideoSAR products captured high-spatial resolution, 2-D, time-varying surface movement. The results from the fifth SPE (SPE-5) used single-polarimetric VideoSAR data. In this paper, we present single-polarimetric and fully polarimetric VideoSAR results while monitoring the SPE-6 underground chemical explosion. We show that fully polarimetric VideoSAR imaging provides a unique, coherent, time-varying measure of the surface expression of the SPE-6 underground chemical explosion. As a result, we include new surface characterization results from the measured PolSAR SPE-6 data via H/A/α polarimetric decomposition.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation (NA-20)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1499698
• Report Number(s): SAND--2018-1333J; 660553
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 57; ISSN 0196-2892
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION
Autofocus
H/A/α
SAR
VideoSAR
coherence
polarimetric decomposition
polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR)
surface movement