The Application of Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery for Studying the Archaeology of the Mayan Biosphere.

In March of 2004, the NASA/JPL Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR) acquired data over much of the Mayan Biosphere in Guatamala. The AIRSAR system is a fully polarimetric and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) that can both accurately measure topography at high resolution (5 m pixels) but can also measure the reflected brightness of the underlying terrain. Since AIRSAR was also a three frequency radar, a comparison can also be made as to the relative brightness at the three wavelengths of radiation. One frequency in particular, P-band, has a wavelength of almost 1 meter, and may significantly penetrate the forest canopy to the underlying surface features. The work that will be presented here will comprise the first step in the data processing - generating an accurate topographic map, and evaluation of that topographic data. This research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.