K&C Science Report – Phase 2 A wall-to-wall PALSAR mosaic of Africa

In the framework of the JAXA Kyoto and Carbon (K&C) project, blanket and systematic observations were acquired by the PALSAR synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in FBD dual-pol mode over those ecosystems of the world, which are of importance for climate change studies, carbon science, environment conservation and related environmental treaties. Starting from these observations, the role of JRC was to assemble a wide area and high spatial resolution (order of 100 m) mosaic of PALSAR images covering the whole African. The mosaic is a dual-band (HH-HV) data set geo-referenced and terrain corrected (by a SRTM DEM) to a latitude-longitude coordinate system with pixel spacing of 8.333 3 10 degrees. The main computational and radar science issues, which had to be taken into account to arrive from raw data at seamless imagery with good radiometric and geometric accuracy, are summarized.