Applications of Synthetic Aperture Radar Polarimetry

The work reported in this paper was carried out under an ESA contract (15600/01/I-LG) with the purpose of demonstrating the potential of polarimetric SAR compared with single-polarization data for some key application areas to support the decisions on future satellite SAR systems. Three key application areas were identified (a) SAR polarimetry for agriculture classification, (b) SAR polarimetry for sea ice monitoring, and (c) Polarimetric SAR Interferometry for retrieval of vegetation parameters. These application areas were selected both because they have shown large improvements using SAR polarimetry, and because they cover important areas for the use of remotely sensed data. In this paper, the results of the study are briefly outlined.