Space-borne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data have been widely used to produce ice concentration (type), ice motion, ice charting (operational route planning), and iceberg detection. Recent availability of polarimetric SAR sensors (e.g., TerraSAR-X, RADARSAT-2, and ALOS PALSAR) enables us to explore the full potential of polarimetric data to derive sea ice information. Among the many sea ice ...

Freshwater habitat quality and quantity are key abiotic variables driving the abundance and distribution of anadromous salmonids. Knowledge is minimal about the condition of freshwater habitats and how habitat condition affects salmon over large, remote areas on both sides of the Arctic and northern Pacific Oceans [1]. This hampers abilities to predict effects of habitat change on salmon and to...

Precise deformation monitoring associated with anthropogenic activities plays a key role for security aspects, damage control and implementing appropriate hazard mitigation measures. In this study, we use observations from high-resolution TerraSAR-X imagery to investigate surface deformation related to two case studies in Germany: the first one is the CO2 storage pilot site in Ketzin and the se...

Lead scientist's background (scientific and aircraft measurements background and experience, English level)More than 10 years experience in satellite remote sensing. PI on several projects with the European Space Agency (ESA) and DLR (TerraSAR-X mission). Visiting Investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. First degree in Physics/Applied Mathematics (major in Astronomy). Masters degr...

This paper concerns the application of mathematical morphology operations for suppression of speckle from radar satellite images. Different traditional widely-used filters are compared with the morphological alternate filters, especially with the filter with multiple structuring function. The comprehensive comparison of the traditional filters is presented, as well as the background on mathemat...

Based on our experience with existing image information mining (IIM) systems and their principal building blocks, we propose new implementation technologies for some of their typical functionalities. These new technologies are supposed to be more efficient than existing solutions and offer new performance perspectives. Motivated by potential new applications of TerraSAR-X data, we deal with fea...

Spatial monitoring tools are necessary to respond to the threat of global biodiversity loss. At the European scale, remote sensing tools for NATURA 2000 habitat monitoring have been requested by the European Commission to fulfill the obligations of the EU Habitats Directive. This paper introduces a method by which swath events in semi-natural grasslands can be detected from multi-temporal Terra...

Improving the geo-localization of optical satellite images is an important pre-processing step for many remote sensing tasks like monitoring by image time series or scene analysis after sudden events. These tasks require geo-referenced and precisely co-registered multi-sensor data. Images captured by the high resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite TerraSAR-X exhibit an absolute geo...