Radar based surface soil moisture retrieval has been subject of intense research during the last decades. However, the space-borne radar sensors available so far provided single configuration observations where the influence of surface roughness frequently caused the solution of the backscattering process to be ill-posed. The ENVISAT/ASAR sensor offers new perspectives since the alternating pol...

SAFIRE-A (Spectroscopy of the Atmosphere using Far InfraRed Emission – Airborne) is a Far Infrared Fourier Transform spectrometer operating onboard the M-55 Geophysica stratospheric aircraft. The spectrometer is one of the instruments participating to the scientific chemical flights of the ESABC (ENVISAT Stratospheric Aircraft and Balloon campaigns) campaigns held in July and October 2002 from ...

For the operational application of multi-temporal ENVISAT ASAR APS data to rice mapping, a complex Wishart distribution based multi-temporal classifier was evaluated in this paper. The classification accuracy of this classifier was quantitatively compared with commonly used classifiers for optical remote sensing image classification including maximum likelihood classifier and minimum euclidean ...

Soil moisture is a key element in the global hydrologic, energy and carbon cycle. Knowledge about the location specific sensitivity of radar backscatter can be used for operational determination of relative soil moisture over large regions. This approach has been developed for C-Band scatterometer and transferred to C-Band ScanSAR within the ESA Tiger Innovator project SHARE (ENVISAT ASAR WS/GM...

Active continental margins are the Earth's principal regions of active deformation and significant earthquake hazard. We apply the enhanced method called Scan Synthetic Aperture Radar (ScanSAR) interferometry to quantify active surface deformation in the coastal region of the South American active margin in central Chile between 22° S and 27° S. Here, as in other active margin settings, crustal...

Geocoded products of synthetic aperture radar data are of great interest for many applications. The conventional processing chain, which leads to geographically referenced synthetic aperture data consists of two main steps: first, the raw data are focused and, in a second step, the resulting single look complex image is geocoded to the favoured coordinate system. We investigate a time-domain ba...

This work investigates the capabilities of spaceborne SAR to extract information on areas close to coastal locations, where the incoming wave fields show strong spatial inhomogeneities. For this purpose, ERS-2 SAR and ENVISAT ASAR images of the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay are used to study the ocean waves in shallow waters under different climate and oceanographic conditions. High resolutio...

The EnviSat altimeter, RA-2, is intended to continue an uninterrupted series of measurements of sea-level and ice-sheet elevation started by ERS-1 in 1991. To fully exploit these measurements, an absolute reference in the time series, and a distinction between instrumental artifacts and significant geophysical signals, is necessary. Therefore, the range bias and instrument drift shall be determ...

ABSTRACT: This paper describes the Extended Exact Transfer Function (EETF) algorithm used in the Kongsberg Spacetec (KSPT) ENVISAT ASAR processor, in addition to RADARSAT and ERS SAR processors from KSPT. This processor is required to handle and process data from image mode (IM), alternating polarization (AP) mode and wide swath (WS) mode. IM and AP mode are both processed using the EETF algori...

ENVISAT ASAR Data acquired over four test sites were analyzed for soil moisture mapping using various models. The polarimetric data covers dual polarized HH/VV, HH/HV and single polarized VV in swaths IS2, IS2, IS4, IS5 and IS6. SIR-C Land C-band data were also used for the verification of models. Dubois et al. empirical and linear regression equations were used for soil moisture estimation. Th...