Concerning gamma nought, one should distinguish between the variant that only compensates for an ellipsoidal incident angle, versus an approach where the local terrain facets are projected into the gamma nought convention (perpendicular to slant range) and integrated throughout a whole DEM to give a “terrain-flattened” result. Beta nought is not compensated even for ellipsoidal incident angle - it reflects the “raw” measurement at the radar, and is extremely ill-suited to land-cover analysis.