Remote Sensing by Synthetic Aperture Radar Technology

Dear Colleagues,

Since the launch of the SEASAT-SAR in 1978, considerable advances and developments have been made in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technologies. From 1990, SAR history is being enriched by the various types of the SARs: spaceborne, shuttle-borne, airborne, and UAV-borne SARs. Following the JERS-1 L-band SAR in 1992, Japan launched the L-band SAR on ALOS in 2006 and achieved the enormous engineering and scientific results. Much progress has also been made by X- and C-band SARs, including SIR series, SRTM, ERS-1/2, RADARSAT-1/2, COSMO-SkyMed, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X. From 2010, SARs are being developed in the various countries and enhancing the unique and valuable functionality of observing the global Earth and its environmental characteristics. "SAR Golden Age", this is the word to express the current and future SAR stream in the world during 2010s. The basic discipline behind this is the ability of acquiring data day and night under all-weather conditions irrespective of cloud cover, ease of mathematic expression, ease of multi variable expression of the microwave in interferometric and polarimetric terms, etc. Based on the experiences on the electromagnetic scattering studies over the decades, we now have been achieving the SAR-based remote sensing for engineering adventure and the geophysical parameter estimation. On these observations, we have planned to launch the spepcial issue of the SAR technologies and the remote sensing as follows.

Prof. Dr. Kazuo Ouchi
Dr. Masanobu Shimada
Guest Editors