In this paper, we evaluate the potential accuracy for the volcanic ash coverage using interferometric coherence of the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar-2 (PALSAR-2) aboard the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2, “DAICHI-2”). In order to detect the disaster affected area from interferometric coherence, we require pre-disaster and co-disaster pairs. That is, we require at least two interferometric archives taken before the disaster in addition to one archive after the disaster. The ideal multi-temporal analysis is performed with of course, highest resolution pairs. However, we do not always have enough number of the archive especially in the early stage of the satellite mission. Here, we use not only Stripmap but also ScanSAR mode archive in order to achieve enough number of pairs. The combination of the Stripmap and ScanSAR archives will help to increase the interferometric pair while it suffers the spatial resolution and coherency. Especially for ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 data, it has not been evaluated the potential accuracy of such Stripmap-ScanSAR interferometry method. In this paper, we use the volcanic eruption event in May 2015 at Kuchinoerabu-jima Island, Kagoshima prefecture, Japan for the case study. We evaluated the proposed method with the truth data which was achieved by manual classification using aerial photography. Experimental results showed that the proposed method marked approximately 91% overall accuracy with 0.64 Kappa coefficients to detect the dense volcanic ash coverage.
