What was the purpose of TerraSAR SIM?

TerraSAR was conceived as a radar system designed to provide observation of the Earth's surface at two different radar frequency bands: L-band and X-band. In its present design, the L-band is fully polarimetric while the X-band system offers multi-polarisation capabilities. The current mission design envisages flying two separate radars on separate platforms.

Funded by the ESA TerraSAR-L mission, the 'Dual-Band SAR - TerraSAR SIM' project's major objective was to quantify the impact of time lag between acquisitions at different wavelengths on Land Use Mapping and crop parameter retrieval, to prove if time lag has an important impact when X- and L-band are acquired non-simultaneously from different platforms.

Previous studies have shown that applications such as crop parameter retrieval and land use classification clearly benefit from the availability of multi-wavelength and multi-polarisation SAR data. Current plans for future SAR missions are based on single-frequency SAR systems.

What was the outcome of TerraSAR SIM?

Investigations of the project based primarily on separability analysis showed that:

• Short term differences between X- and L-band acquisition not significant influence agricultural and land use applications,
• Processing levels of L-band don't have a significant impact on the results of separability analysis / classification / biomass retrieval,
• Results improved when multi-frequency data is used with respect to single frequencies

Download the TerraSAR SIM Final Report

Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.5270/esa-9uva1r2 - Terra SARSim: " AO4212 2002 / Dualband TerraSAR SIM "

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