The ERS Interferometric Quick Look Processor: a Powerful System to Assess and Exploit the ERS Tandem Archive for Land-Use Information Retrieval

The ERS Interferometric Quick Look processor developed by ESA has made it possible to examine the interferometric coherence of ERS data for land-use applications on a world wide scale. Many successful interferometric studies have been focussed on relatively small regions of terrain. This is partly because of the localised nature of some of the areas of interest but also because of the relatively high processing load required by interferometry. The Interferometric Quick Look system has been designed to rapidly process complete strips of ERS SAR data and many examples, covering a wide range of land surfaces, have been processed at ESRIN. Some of these can be viewed at: http://earth1.esrin.esa.it/INSI In this paper we describe the Interferometric Quick Look system, show examples of how its output is relevant to land classification, and discuss the use of the system to assess ERS Tandem data for land-use exploitation.