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...

Studies of iceberg detection in the Franz Josef land region have been performed by use of optical images in combination with and Synthetic Aperture Radar images during April 2006. Alternating Polarization (AP) images (HHand VV-pol) from ASAR and RADARSAT ScanSAR Narrow images were tested against Landsat images for identification of 15 icebergs of size between 50 and 400 m. The three types of SA...

Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) dual-polarization data are shown to be effective for regional forest monitoring. To this scope, an automatic SAR image preprocessing procedure was developed using SRTM DEM and Landsat TM image for geocoding in rugged terrain and smooth terrain areas, respectively. An object-oriented forest and non-forest classification method is then proposed bas...

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...

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...

ENVISAT ASAR Wide Swath data from ascending and descending orbit have been normalized and combined in the eastern Alps in order to increase the covered area from 60-70% to up to 78%. Band rationing was applied for the identification of wet snow surface. Although that probability maps of thawing snow can be derived, combinations of morning and evening orbits are difficult to interpret in late sp...

The paper describes how ASAR observations and electromagnetic models were used to obtain estimates of water level below two marshes with different vegetations structure in the Paraná River Delta in Argentina. The approach followed is based on the analysis of a temporal set of ENVISAT ASAR data which includes images acquired under different polarizations and incidence angles as well as different...