ENVISAT ASAR is successfully operating since March 2002 and resulting ASAR products are operationally distributed to the user community since December 2002. This paper provides an update of the ASAR performance, from the instrument status to the product quality assessment. 1. ASAR INSTRUMENT STATUS Routine monitoring of the 320 antenna T/R modules is daily performed using Module Stepping Mode (...

Oil spill patterns detected from Envisat ASAR images were integrated with hydrodynamic and oil spill trajectory models for the purposes of understanding the August 11, 2006 M/T Solar 1 oil spill, and to evaluate the accuracy of the oil spill patterns simulated by an oil trajectory model. The oil spill incident event that occurred a few kilometers southwest of Guimaras Island in Panay Gulf and I...

A near-real time GMES-relevant monitoring system for semi-operational retrieval of snow covered area for hydrological and climatological applications has been developed in the Envisnow EC EESD FP 5 project. The system, using ENVISAT ASAR wide swath data from ESA AOE 785 and from the Kongsberg satellite station, geocodes and classifies Envisat ASAR data automatically, and produces SCA maps with ...

Interferometric ALOS PALSAR Fine Beam Single/Dual, multi-temporal ENVISAT ASAR Alternating Polarization, and Landsat-5 TM/-7 ETM+ data are used for the generation of land cover and change maps. In synthesis, the product generation foresees two main steps: The first one consists in a rigorous data pre-processing, including interferometric processing (PALSAR), geometric / radiometric calibration ...

This paper reports on the analysis of a 2.5 year-long time series of ASAR wide swath mode (WSM) observations for characterizing the soil moisture dynamics. The employed ASAR WSM data set consists of 152 VV-polarized scenes acquired in the period between April 2005 and September 2007 over the Naqu river basin located on the Tibetan Plateau. For four different spatial domains, with areas of 30x30...

Considering the problem in monitoring agricultural condition in the semi-arid areas of Northwest of China, we propose a new method for estimation of crop planting area, using the single phase optical and microwave remote sensing data collaboratively, which have demonstrated their respective advantages in the extraction of surface features. In the model, the ASAR backscatter coefficient is norma...

In this paper, a practical scheme for assimilation of multi-temporal and multi-polarization ENVISAT ASAR data in rice crop model to map rice yield has been presented. To achieve this, rice distribution information should be obtained first by rice mapping method to retrieve rice fields from ASAR images, and then an assimilation method is applied to use the temporal single-polarized rice backscat...

As confirmed by many scientists, atmosphere has intensive contaminative role on Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) measurements. Atmospheric parameters, always influence radar’s phase but the intensity of the atmospheric errors on interferograms depend on the difference of the parameters’ values. In this paper, some calibration methods will be considered in order to reduce the err...