TOPSAR is a recently proposed SAR mode for wide swath acquisition, which is intended to replace the conventional ScanSAR mode. TOPSAR will be used by the ESA Sentinel-1 SAR sensor in its main interferometric wide swath mode. TerraSAR-X has demonstrated the TOPSAR mode in space by acquiring and processing TOPSAR images for the first time. The paper reports the results of the image scalloping ana...

The retrieval of the bare soil moisture content from TerraSAR-X data is discussed using empirical approaches. Two cases were evaluated: (1) one image at low or high incidence angle, (2) two images, one at low incidence and one at high incidence. This study shows in using three databases collected between 2008 and 2010 over two study sites in France (Orgeval and Villamblain) that TerraSAR-X is a...

TOPSAR is a recently proposed SAR mode for wide swath acquisition, which is foreseen to be used by the ESA Sentinel-1 SAR sensor in its main interferometric wide swath mode. The Microwaves and Radar Institute of the German Aerospace Center is validating TOPSAR mode in space with TerraSAR-X data within the framework of an ESA commissioned project. Several TOPSAR images have been successfully com...

Forest mapping and monitoring surveys are often based on costly and time-consuming field work. Satellite remote sensing data can facilitate these procedures over large forest areas [1]. Therefore, the Forest Research Institute of Baden Württemberg and the Department of Remote Sensing and Landscape Information Systems of the University of Freiburg aim on developing methods to support and to impr...

Generating Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) out of interferometric image pairs is one of the well-known SAR applications which are used all over the world. The aim of our project is to find new/extended methods for InSAR processing to improve the quality of the final DEM result. We investigate in the fields of image registration, baseline estimation/interpolation and phase unwrapping. In each di...

In this paper we investigate the possibility to exploit TOPS data to measure ground displacement movements by means of Differential SAR Interferometry (DInSAR). Several critical points (i.e. coregistration) have to be faced during the data processing since, due to the TOPS signal characteristics, the interferometric chain is very sensitive to small implementation errors. The obtained results wi...