Estimation of forest biomass using spaceborne SAR data is an active field of investigation. C-band backscatter is known to provide little information on biomass because of the weak sensitivity to forest biophysical properties. However, if a large multitemporal dataset is used, it should be possible to improve the estimation. This assumption has been tested with ENVISAT ASAR Wide Swath (WS) data...

The objective of this paper is to investigate the use of HH/VV backscatter ratio, derived from data acquired by the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) system at high incidence angles (i.e. swaths I5-I7), to discriminate wheat from other crops. The wheat classification is obtained by applying an optimal threshold derived from the statistical distribution of the co-polarized backscatter rat...

SUMMARY Observations from different disciplines have shown that our planet is highly heterogeneous at multiple scale lengths. Still, many seismological Earth models tend not to include any small-scale heterogeneity or lateral velocity variations, which can affect measurements and predictions based on these homogeneous models. In this study, we describe the lithospheric isotropic structure in te...

Two-dimensional ocean wave spectra are measured from ENVISAT ASAR wave mode cross spectra on a global scale. The measurement is performed using a parametric retrieval scheme, which makes use of prior information taken from numerical wave models. The Partition Rescale and Shift algorithm (PARSA) is based on a partitioning technique, which splits an a prior wave spectrum into its wave system comp...

With its ASAR wave mode, the ENVISAT mission provides a continuity of the ERS-1/2 wave mode, but with more flexible measurement capabilities and an enhanced product variety offered to the user community. Wave vignettes can be taken at 100 km spacing in flight direction either in VV or HH polarization using any of the seven ASAR standard beams. Furthermore, two beams can be used alternatively pr...

A parametric algorithm is presented to estimate two-dimensional ocean wave spectra from ENVISAT ASAR wave mode data on a global scale. The retrieval scheme makes use of prior information taken from numerical wave models. The Partition Rescale and Shift algorithm (PARSA) is based on a partitioning technique, which splits an a priori wave spectrum into its wave system components. Integral paramet...

Two-dimensional ocean wave spectra are measured from ENVISAT ASAR wave mode cross spectra on a global scale. The measurement is performed using a parametric retrieval scheme, which makes use of prior information taken from numerical wave models. The Partition Rescale and Shift algorithm (PARSA) is based on a partitioning technique, which splits an a prior wave spectrum into its wave system comp...

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...

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...