Estimation of tree height from PolInSAR : the effects of vertical structure and temporal decorrelation

Abstract

I would like to thank the European Space Agency for providing data and helping me whenever I faced an obstacle to process the data and getting results. I am also grateful to Dr.Marco Lavalle for providing AfriSAR campaign data as an early access and AfriSAR team at NASA and ESA for organizing and distributing the data acquired during the 2016 AfriSAR Campaign. I also thank the UAVSAR and ISCE teams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology for collecting and processing the radar images, and the LVIS team at the Goddard Space Flight Center for collecting and processing the lidar data used in this publication. I would like to thank my fellow doctoral students for their feedback, cooperation and of course friendship. In addition I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of ITC for their support and help during all these years. I would like to thank my friends for accepting nothing less than excellence from me. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family: my parents and to my sisters for supporting me spiritually throughout writing this thesis and my life in general. vii