Monitoring water area variation of the po river using dual-polarimetric sar data

In this study, dual-polarimetric (DP) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) time series collected by the Sentinel-1 SAR mission is exploited to evaluate the changes that occurred over the surface water area of the Po River, in Italy. First, a DP technique based on an incoherent combination of coand cross-polarized SAR channels are used to enhance the separability between surface river water and land areas. Then, a binary image where the river and the land area are well separated is generated using a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector. Once the water-covered area is estimated, an indepth analysis based on the Shannon entropy is applied to understand the time variability of the water extension of the Po River. Experimental results show that the dual-polarimetric approach can effectively monitor the water body changes that occurred over the river Po basin in an effective way.