Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar: Principles and Application

This open access book focuses on the practical application of electromagnetic polarimetry principles in Earth remote sensing with an educational purpose. In the last decade, the operations from fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar such as  the Japanese ALOS/PalSAR, the Canadian Radarsat-2 and the German TerraSAR-X  and their easy data access for scientific use have developed further the research and data applications at L,C and X band. As a consequence, the wider distribution of polarimetric data sets across the remote sensing community boosted activity and development in polarimetric SAR applications, also in view of future missions. Numerous experiments with real data from spaceborne platforms are shown, with the aim of giving an up-to-date and complete treatment of the unique benefits of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data in five different domains: forest, agriculture, cryosphere, urban and oceans.

Irena Hajnsek is Professor of Earth Observation and Radar Remote Sensing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich Institute of Environmental Engineering and at the same time head of the Polarimetric SAR Interferometry research group at the German Aerospace Center Microwaves and Radar Institute. Her main research interests are in electromagnetic propagation and scattering theory, radar polarimetry, SAR and interferometric SAR data processing techniques, environmental parameter modelling and estimation. She received her Dipl. degree in 1996 from the Free University of Berlin, Germany and the Dr. degree in 2001 from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany. Since 2010 she is the science coordinator of the German satellite mission TanDEM-X and proposed satellite mission Tandem-L.

 

Yves-Louis DESNOS is Head of the Data Applications Division in the ESA EO Programme Directorate, Frascati, Italy. He is incharge of the EO Science for Society element of the Future Earth Observation envelope programme. His current activities encompass new scientific research, developing user applications, fostering industry growth and leveraging on latest platforms technology.  He graduated as Engineer at E.S.T.A.C.A.(1982), obtained a specialisation degree in Space at E.N.S.A.E (1983) and started his career at Thomson-CSF as RADAR system engineer (1984). He joined ESA-ESTEC as RADAR engineer (1989) and was appointed ASAR principal engineer in the ENVISAT project (1996). He was chairman of CEOS WGCV SAR subgroup (1996-2000) and chairman of CEOS WGCV (2000-2003). Since 2006, he is also ESA Senior Advisor on SAR technologies and applications. In 2014, he received the P.R. China’s Friendship Award for the Dragon cooperation.