Observation of Water Volume Changes of Rivers in Amazon Forests from Multi-temporal JERS-1 SAR Images

We have developed a new method to visualize river networks in tropical rain forests from JERS-1 SAR images. This method compresses river information in an original SAR image to a small image displaying wide rivers as dark objects in real size and narrower rivers as bright objects showing brightness level as an indicator of the discharge. We applied this method to 476 images of Amazon forests, 13 observations for path 415 data and 11 observations for path 416 data between 1993 and 1997. We confirmed that a change observed in a preliminary experiment was certainly a part of seasonal changes. The changes roughly correspond to the monthly precipitation changes. Through a simple digital analysis although qualitative, we also detected subtle but consistent regional differences among minor tributaries that belong to a major tributary basin.