The German radar satellite TerraSAR-X was launched in June 2007 [1] and is currently ending its commissioning phase. We anticipate quite different interferometric application scenarios compared to ERS1/2 and ASAR due to the X-band frequency, the short orbital repeat cycles of 11 days, the high range resolution and the spotlight mode of this sensor. During the commissioning phase we have schedul...

With the amount of traffic increasing steadily, traffic monitoring has evolved to an important topic of research. Most of the conventional systems for traffic monitoring lack of spatial extent. Hence traffic monitoring from space provides an attractive alternative to supplement existing systems. The upcoming TerraSAR-X Mission with its experimental dual-receive mode will contribute to this rese...

The monitoring of Alpine glacier activity is one of the applications which require the combined use of ground measurements and SAR data. It should become feasible thanks to the new generation SAR satellites (ALOS, TerraSAR-X, Cosmo-SkyMed and RadarSAT-2) and the high precision GPS measurements. This paper presents the early results of an experiment which started in 2007 on Argentière glacier (M...

The potential use of TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 data for soil moisture retrieval over bare agricultural areas was investigated using both empirical and semi-empirical approaches. For the empirical approach, the Support Vector Regression (SVR) model was used with two cases: (1) using only one C-band or X-band image; and (2) using a pair of C-band and X-band images jointly. For the semi-empirical ...

Some early results of the TerraSAR-X observations of the northeastern Adriatic bora wind are presented in this paper. TerraSAR-X is a German X-band radar satellite launched in 2007 that carries phased array X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) operating in different polarizations and providing multiple imaging modes. SAR backscatter can be used to derive wind fields at spatial resolution that ...

With TerraSAR-X and RADARSAT-2, two dual-channel SAR satellites will be launched in the next months. Both sensors allow for detecting moving objects, and, by this, enable traffic monitoring from space. This paper revises the theoretical background of traffic monitoring with space-based SARs and presents concepts for the TerraSAR-X traffic monitoring system. Compared to previous work an extensiv...

The wide application of high-resolution SAR data, such as TanDEM-X and TerraSAR-X, has resulted in an increase of the data processing difficulty of interferograms, especially in urban areas with serious layovers caused by high-rise buildings. In this paper, a new method based on frequency estimation is proposed to extract and compensate the building layover phase without considering the buildin...

SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) has ability to detect subtle surface movement at the scale of millimeter to centimeter. TerraSAR-X is new radar satellite operated at X-band, multi polarization, and multi beam mode. Compared with C-band or L-band SAR, the X-band system inherently suffers from more temporal decorrelation due to short wavelength (3.1 cm), but is more sensitive to surface deformatio...