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

Journal Article · · IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

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 Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
Grant/Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000
OSTI ID:
1499698
Report Number(s):
SAND-2018-1333J; 660553
Journal Information:
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Vol. 57, Issue 5; ISSN 0196-2892
Publisher:
IEEECopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 13 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science