Abstract
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging systems derive microwave data, from space or airborne (piloted and remote piloted), that provide opportunities for the interpretation of many characteristics of the terrain surface. The increasing number of satellites equipped with SAR data acquisition systems that are being launched with a range of wavelengths, polarizations, and operating characteristics are enabling a better understanding of the earth’s environment, for such activities as vegetation analysis, forest inventories, land subsidence, and urban analysis. In addition, airborne systems for remote piloted systems and ground-based systems are available. This Special Issue presents six quality scientific papers on typical applications of SAR technologies. They include methods for the determination of above ground biomass (AGB), crop mapping using data from an advanced X-band system developed in Japan, analysis of natural and human-induced slow-rate ground deformations in the region of Campania, in Italy, the location of landslides caused by natural phenomena based on SAR images derived from the Japanese high-resolution Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2), and monitoring the size of refugee camps and their environmental impacts caused by the displacement of people from Myanmar to the Cox’s Bazar District, around Kutupalong, in Bangladesh. The paper concludes with some comments on the future directions of developments in SAR systems.
Highlights
Radar technologies for mapping land cover and landform have been available since the 1960s, the systems originally being based on so-called real-aperture radar systems
The distance the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) antenna travels over a target, while the radar pulses are being returned to the antenna, creates a large synthetic aperture antenna, which can result in a much higher spatial resolution of the derived radar images, following the necessary processing of the raw data
In [1,2], methods were developed for determining above-ground biomass, the first being based on water cloud modelling (WCM) from quad-polarised L-band (PALSAR) data on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2), and the second from dual-polarised X-band TerraSAR-X and quad-pol-InSAR C-band data from RADARSAT-2 data
Summary
Radar technologies for mapping land cover and landform have been available since the 1960s, the systems originally being based on so-called real-aperture radar systems. The resolution of the data derived from real aperture systems was poor and the mapping products were of low accuracy. Radar interferometry (InSAR), in which frequency differences in radiation emitted by one antenna and received by two separated antennas, can be used to measure height differences with high accuracy. This special issue, comprising six papers, describes some applications of the currently available SAR technologies for remote sensing and is a forerunner to applications that can be expected in the future as the technologies develop to include global coverage based on digital beamforming and multi-static systems, as well as radar tomography
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