Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Remote Sensing for Civil and Environmental Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a high-resolution imaging technique widely used for earth observation. It has made significant progress in solving remote sensing problems. The main characteristic of SAR systems is that they operate in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, enabling them to collect data at night and diminishing their sensitivity to weather conditions, such as clouds and rain. Today, SAR sensors used in Earth observations operate at wide wavelengths, from 70 cm (P-band) to mm-waves in W-band, from medium to very high resolutions, and various polarizations (linear, circular, and compact). SAR can provide unique capabilities compared to sensors in the optical domain or passive microwaves. Due to microwave data having a longer wavelength than optical data, SAR has a higher penetration depth and provides more information about the inside of the media, e.g., surface and deep soil moisture. SAR data consist of two parts: amplitude and phase. The amplitude contains the physical properties, while the phase relates to the range information of the monitoring scene, enabling the retrieval of height information or surface deformations with mm-scale precision through the interference of at least two phase observations. With the availability of data from several satellite SAR missions launched in the past decade, the launch of missions such as NISAR and BIOMASS on the horizon, the prevalence of commercial SAR satellites and increasing airborne campaigns, and recent developments in UAV and ground-based SAR systems, the utility of SAR data for civil and environmental applications is increasing at a fast pace.

SAR data in different imaging modes, frequencies, and polarizations are sensitive to different parts of the monitoring area, providing different interactions with natural/manmade media at each mode. While these unique capabilities increase the applications of SAR, they also increase the complexity of interpreting and retrieving meaningful information. Thus, analyzing SAR data for different Earth observation applications and addressing the mentioned challenges is one of the active research areas in the remote sensing community.

This Special Issue aims to provide an overview of the latest advances and developments in SAR remote sensing technologies and processing techniques for civil and environmental applications. The research topics covered in this issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Advanced SAR techniques, including polarimetry, interferometry, and tomography, and their applications.
• Soil, vegetation, and carbon cycle monitoring: forest biomass, agriculture, wetlands, drought, erosion.
• Ice and snow monitoring: cryosphere, glaciers, snow depth, ice sheets, permafrost.
• Urban monitoring: infrastructures, building footprints, damage detection.
• Geohazards and disasters: floods, landslides, subsidence, volcanic activities.
• Information retrieval: soil moisture, soil roughness, vegetation moisture, vegetation canopy structure.
• Analysis, validation, and calibration of newly developed SAR sensors for geoscience applications.
• Applications of data-driven and artificial intelligence techniques in SAR data processing and analysis.

Dr. Saeid Homayouni
Dr. Hossein Aghababaee
Dr. Alireza Tabatabaeenejad
Dr. Benyamin Hosseiny
Guest Editors

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• synthetic aperture radar
• microwave remote sensing
• PolSAR/PolInSAR
• tomographic SAR
• backscattering modeling
• environmental monitoring