Search Results (91)

Assimilation of weather radar data, as well as additional data like lightning data, in high-resolution weather forecast models is a promising method to improve short-term forecasting (nowcasting) of flash-flood events. A data assimilation system based on the Weather Research and Forecasting model is used in this study, with radar reflectivity and radial velocity data collected with X-band Doppler polarimetric radar in the area of Athens, Greece, and lightning observations obtained from a lightning detection network covering Greece. Radar data are assimilated with the four-dimensional variational method, which includes a full-hydrometeor assimilation scheme, in a nested domain of the model with a resolution of 3 km. Humidity, vertical velocity and horizontal wind divergence profiles estimated from lightning data are assimilated with a three-dimensional variation method in the parent domain of the model with a resolution of 9 km. The results from a case study are presented to show the effect of assimilating each type of data. Full article

Burned area detection plays a critical role in assessing the impact of forest and land fires, particularly in Indonesia, where both peatland and non-peatland areas are increasingly affected. Optical remote sensing has been widely used for this task, but its effectiveness is limited by persistent cloud cover in tropical regions. A Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) offers a cloud-independent alternative for burned area mapping. This study investigates the performance of a Stacking Ensemble Neural Network (SENN) model using polarimetric features derived from both C-band (Sentinel 1) and L-band (Advanced Land Observing Satellite—Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (ALOS-2/PALSAR-2)) data. The analysis covers three representative sites in Indonesia: peatland areas in (1) Rokan Hilir, (2) Merauke, and non-peatland areas in (3) Bima and Dompu. Validation is conducted using high-resolution PlanetScope imagery(Planet Labs PBC—San Francisco, California, United States). The results show that the SENN model consistently outperforms conventional artificial neural network (ANN) approaches across most evaluation metrics. L-band SAR data yields a superior performance to the C-band, particularly in peatland areas, with overall accuracy reaching 93–96% and precision between 92 and 100%. The method achieves 76% accuracy and 89% recall in non-peatland regions. Performance is lower in dry, hilly savanna landscapes. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of the SENN, especially with L-band SAR, in improving burned area detection across diverse land types, supporting more reliable fire monitoring efforts in Indonesia. Full article

Feature detection is one of the hot topics in the weather radar research community. This study employed a convective–stratiform classification algorithm to detect features in polarimetric radar variables and Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (QPE) retrieval during a heavy precipitation event in Crossville, Tennessee, during warm-season convection. Analysis of polarimetric radar variables revealed that strong updrafts, mixed-phase precipitation, and large hailstones in the radar resolution volume during the event were driven by the existence of supercell thunderstorms. The results of feature detection highlight that the regions with convective–stratiform cores and strong–faint features in the reflectivity field are similar to those in the rainfall field, demonstrating how the algorithm more effectively detects features in both fields. The results of the estimates, accounting for uncertainty during feature detection, indicate that an offset of +2 dB overestimated convective features in the northeast in both the reflectivity and rainfall fields, while an offset of −2 dB underestimated convective features in the northwest part of both fields. The results highlight that convective cores cover a small area with high rainfall exceeding 50 mmh⁻¹, while stratiform cores cover a larger area with greater horizontal homogeneity and lower rainfall intensity. These findings are significant for nowcasting weather, numerical models, hydrological applications, and enhancing climatological computations. Full article

Due to the all-time and all-weather characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, they have become an important input for optical image restoration, and various cloud removal datasets based on SAR-optical have been proposed. Currently, the construction of multi-source cloud removal datasets typically employs single-polarization or dual-polarization backscatter SAR feature images, lacking a comprehensive description of target scattering information and polarization characteristics. This paper constructs a high-resolution remote sensing dataset, AIR-POLSAR-CR1.0, based on optical images, backscatter feature images, and polarization feature images using the fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data. The dataset has been manually annotated to provide a foundation for subsequent analyses and processing. Finally, this study performs a performance analysis of typical cloud removal deep learning algorithms based on different categories and cloud coverage on the proposed standard dataset, serving as baseline results for this benchmark. The results of the ablation experiment also demonstrate the effectiveness of the PolSAR data. In summary, AIR-POLSAR-CR1.0 fills the gap in polarization feature images and demonstrates good adaptability for the development of deep learning algorithms. Full article

Timely monitoring of distribution and growth state of crops is crucial for agricultural management. Remote sensing (RS) techniques provide an effective tool to monitor crops. This study proposes a novel approach for the identification of typical crops, including rapeseed and wheat, using multisource remote sensing data and deep learning technology. By adopting an improved DeepLabV3+ network architecture that integrates a feature-enhanced module and an attention module, multiple features from both optical data and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data are fully mined to take into account the spectral reflectance traits and polarimetric scattering straits of crops. The proposal can effectively address the limitations of using a single data source, alleviating the misclassification problem brought by the spectral similarity of crops in certain bands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed crop identification DeepLabV3+ (CI-DeepLabV3+) method outperforms traditional classification methods and the original DeepLabV3+ network, with an overall accuracy and F1 score of 94.54% and 94.55%, respectively. Experimental results also support the conclusion that using multiple features from multi-source data can indeed improve the performance of the network. Full article

The LuTan-1 (LT-1) satellite, launched in 2022, is China’s first L-band full-polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constellation, boasting interferometry capabilities. However, given its limited use in subsidence monitoring to date, a comprehensive evaluation of LT-1’s interferometric quality and capabilities is necessary. In this study, we utilized the Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) technique to analyze mining-induced subsidence results near Shenmu City (China) with LT-1 data, revealing nine subsidence areas with a maximum subsidence of −19.6 mm within 32 days. Furthermore, a comparative analysis between LT-1 and Sentinel-1 data was conducted focusing on the aspects of subsidence results, interferometric phase, scattering intensity, and interferometric coherence. Notably, LT-1 detected some subsidence areas larger than those identified by Sentinel-1, attributed to LT-1’s high resolution, which significantly enhances the detectability of deformation gradients. Additionally, the coherence of LT-1 data exceeded that of Sentinel-1 due to LT-1’s L-band long wavelength compared to Sentinel-1’s C-band. This higher coherence facilitated more accurate capturing of differential interferometric phases, particularly in areas with large-gradient subsidence. Moreover, the quality of LT-1’s monitoring results surpassed that of Sentinel-1 in root mean square error (RMSE), standard deviation (SD), and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In conclusion, these findings provide valuable insights for future subsidence-monitoring tasks utilizing LT-1 data. Ultimately, the systematic differences between LT-1 and Sentinel-1 satellites confirm that LT-1 is well-suited for detailed and accurate subsidence monitoring in complex environments. Full article

The use of near-Earth space has grown dramatically during the last decades, resulting in thousands of active and inactive satellites and a huge amount of space debris. To observe and monitor the near-Earth space environment, radar systems play a major role as they can be operated at any time and under any weather conditions. The Tracking and Imaging Radar (TIRA) is one of the largest space observation radars in the world. It consists of a 34$\mathrm{m}$ Cassegrain antenna, a precise tracking radar, and a high-resolution imaging radar. Since the 1990s, TIRA contributes to the field of space domain awareness by tracking and imaging space objects and by monitoring the debris population. Due to new technologies, modern satellites become smaller, and satellite extensions become more compact. Thus, sensitive high-resolution space observation systems are needed to detect, track, and image these space objects. To fulfill these requirements, TIRA is undergoing a major upgrade. The current imaging radar in the Ku band will be replaced by a new radar with improved geometrical and radiometric resolution operating in the Ka band. Due to its wideband fully polarimetric capability, the new imaging radar will increase the analysis and characterization of space objects. In addition, the tracking radar in the L band is also being currently refurbished. Through its novel modular structure and open design, highly flexible radar modes and precise tracking concepts can be efficiently implemented for enhanced space domain awareness. The new TIRA system will mark the start of a new era for space observation with radar in Europe. Full article

Polarimetric high-resolution range profile (HRRP), with its rich polarimetric and spatial information, has become increasingly important in radar automatic target recognition (RATR). This study proposes an interpretable target-aware vision Transformer (ITAViT) for polarimetric HRRP target recognition with a novel attention loss. In ITAViT, we initially fuse the polarimetric features and the amplitude of polarimetric HRRP with a polarimetric preprocessing layer (PPL) to obtain the feature map as the input of the subsequent network. The vision Transformer (ViT) is then used as the backbone to automatically extract both local and global features. Most importantly, we introduce a novel attention loss to optimize the alignment between the attention map and the HRRP span. Thus, it can improve the difference between the target and the background, and enable the model to more effectively focus on real target areas. Experiments on a simulated X-band dataset demonstrate that our proposed ITAViT outperforms comparative models under various experimental conditions. Ablation studies highlight the effectiveness of polarimetric preprocessing and attention loss. Furthermore, the visualization of the self-attention mechanism suggests that attention loss enhances the interpretability of the network. Full article

Polarization diversity has been widely used in maritime radars to improve target detection performance. Full utilization of the polarimetric characteristics of sea clutter is the key to designing effective polarimetric detectors. For high-resolution maritime radars, the HH-HV dual-polarization is an affordable and effective mode to monitor small targets, owing to the simple configuration of single-polarimetric transmit and dual-polarimetric reception and lower clutter powers at the HH and HV polarizations. Enlightened by the analytical coherent detector in compound-Gaussian clutter with inverse Gamma texture, this paper investigates dual-polarimetric coherent detection in dual-polarimetric compound-Gaussian clutter with independent inverse Gamma distributed textures. The analytical dual-polarimetric near-optimum coherent detector is derived, which is a fusion of the generalized likelihood ratio test linear threshold detectors (GLRT-LTDs) at the two polarizations. For short, it is referred to as the P-GLRT-LTD. It is proven that the P-GLRT-LTD is of constant false alarm rate with respect to the Doppler steering vector, scale parameters of textures, and speckle covariance matrices. Moreover, the thresholds of the P-GLRT-LTD are given analytically. Experiments using simulated sea clutter data with the estimated scale and shape parameters from the two measured intelligent pixel processing radar (IPIX) datasets and two measured IPIX datasets with test targets are made to compare P-GLRT-LTD with other existing dual-polarimetric coherent detectors. The results show that the P-GLRT-LTD attains the same detection performance as the existing best-performance detector. The P-GLRT-LTD has a lower computational cost than the existing best-performing one. Full article

Speckle noise and the spatial resolution of the Sentinel−1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image can cause significant difficulties in the detection of small objects, such as small ships. Therefore, in this study, the Polarimetric Combination-based Ship Detection (PCSD) approach is proposed for enhancing small ship detection performance, which combines three different characteristics of polarization: newVH, enhanced VH, and enhanced VV. Employing the Radar Cross Section (RCS) value in three stages, the newVH was utilized to detect Automatic Identification System (AIS) -ships and small ships. In the first step, the adaptive threshold (AT) method was applied to newVH with a high RCS condition (>−10.36 (dB)) for detecting AIS-ships. Secondly, the first small ship target was detected with the maximum suppression of false alarms by using the AT with a middle RCS condition (>−16.98 (dB)). In the third step, a candidate group was identified by applying a condition to the RCS values (>−23.01 (dB)), where both small ships and speckle noise were present simultaneously. Subsequently, the enhanced VH and VV polarizations were employed, and an optimized threshold value was selected for each polarization to detect the second small ship while eliminating noise pixels. Finally, the results were evaluated using the AIS and small fishing vessel tracking system (V-Pass) based on the detected ship positions and ship lengths. The average matching results from 26 scenes in 2022 indicated a matching rate of over 86.67% for AIS-ships. Regarding small ships, the detection performance of PCSD was 42.27%, which was over twice as accurate as the previous Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) ship detection model. As a result, PCSD enhanced the detection rate of small ships while maintaining the capacity for detecting AIS-equipped ships. Full article

Land cover classification using high-resolution Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) images obtained from satellites is a challenging task. While deep learning algorithms have been extensively studied for PolSAR image land cover classification, the performance is severely constrained due to the scarcity of labeled PolSAR samples and the limited domain acceptance of models. Recently, the emergence of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) based on the vision transformer (VIT) model has brought about a revolution in the study of specific downstream tasks in computer vision. Benefiting from its millions of parameters and extensive training datasets, SAM demonstrates powerful capabilities in extracting semantic information and generalization. To this end, we propose a dual-stream feature extraction network based on SAM, i.e., BSDSNet. We change the image encoder part of SAM to a dual stream, where the ConvNext image encoder is utilized to extract local information and the VIT image encoder is used to extract global information. BSDSNet achieves an in-depth exploration of semantic and spatial information in PolSAR images. Additionally, to facilitate a fine-grained amalgamation of information, the SA-Gate module is employed to integrate local–global information. Compared to previous deep learning models, BSDSNet’s impressive ability to represent features is akin to a versatile receptive field, making it well suited for classifying PolSAR images across various resolutions. Comprehensive evaluations indicate that BSDSNet achieves excellent results in qualitative and quantitative evaluation when performing classification tasks on the AIR-PolSAR-Seg dataset and the WHU-OPT-SAR dataset. Compared to the suboptimal results, our method improves the Kappa metric by 3.68% and 0.44% on the AIR-PolSAR-Seg dataset and the WHU-OPT-SAR dataset, respectively. Full article

The potential of a coherent microwave radar for infrastructure health monitoring has been investigated over the past decade. Microwave radar measuring based on interferometry processing is a non-invasive technique that can measure the line-of-sight (LOS) displacements of large infrastructure with sub-millimeter precision and provide the corresponding frequency spectrum. It has the capability to estimate infrastructure vibration simultaneously and remotely with high accuracy and repeatability, which serves the long-term serviceability of bridge structures within the context of the long-term sustainability of civil engineering infrastructure management. In this paper, we present three types of microwave radar systems employed to monitor the displacement of bridges in Japan and Italy. A technique that fuses polarimetric analysis and the interferometry technique for bridge monitoring is proposed. Monitoring results achieved with full polarimetric real aperture radar (RAR), step-frequency continuous-wave (SFCW)-based linear synthetic aperture, and multi-input multi-output (MIMO) array sensors are also presented. The results reveal bridge dynamic responses under different loading conditions, including wind, vehicular traffic, and passing trains, and show that microwave sensor interferometry can be utilized to monitor the dynamics of bridge structures with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. This paper demonstrates that microwave sensor interferometry with efficient, cost-effective, and non-destructive properties is a serious contender to employment as a sustainable infrastructure monitoring technology serving the sustainable development agenda. Full article

In most developing countries, smallholder farms are the ultimate source of income and produce a significant portion of overall crop production for the major crops. Accurate crop distribution mapping and acreage estimation play a major role in optimizing crop production and resource allocation. In this study, we aim to develop a spatio–temporal, multi-spectral, and multi-polarimetric LULC mapping approach to assess crop distribution mapping and acreage estimation for the Oromia Region in Ethiopia. The study was conducted by integrating data from the optical and radar sensors of sentinel products. Supervised machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Classification and Regression Trees, and Gradient Boost were used to classify the study area into five first-class common land use types (built-up, agriculture, vegetation, bare land, and water). Training and validation data were collected from ground and high-resolution images and split in a 70:30 ratio. The accuracy of the classification was evaluated using different metrics such as overall accuracy, kappa coefficient, figure of metric, and F-score. The results indicate that the SVM classifier demonstrates higher accuracy compared to other algorithms, with an overall accuracy for Sentinel-2-only data and the integration of optical with microwave data of 90% and 94% and a kappa value of 0.85 and 0.91, respectively. Accordingly, the integration of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data resulted in higher overall accuracy compared to the use of Sentinel-2 data alone. The findings demonstrate the remarkable potential of multi-source remotely sensed data in agricultural acreage estimation in small farm holdings. These preliminary findings highlight the potential of using multi-source active and passive remote sensing data for agricultural area mapping and acreage estimation. Full article

In this article, we propose a Fourier–Legendre (FL) polynomial forest height estimation algorithm based on low-frequency single-baseline polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PolInSAR) data. The algorithm can obtain forest height with a single-baseline PolInSAR configuration while capturing a high-resolution vertical profile for the forest volume. This is based on the consideration that the forest height remains constant within neighboring pixels. Meanwhile, we also assume that the coefficients of the FL polynomials remain unchanged within neighboring pixels, except for the last polynomial coefficient. The idea of using neighboring pixels to increase the observations provides us with the possibility to obtain high-order FL polynomials. With this approach, it is possible to obtain a high-resolution vertical profile that is suitable for forest height estimation without losing too much spatial resolution. P-band PolInSAR data acquired in Mabounie in Gabon and Krycklan in Sweden were selected for testing the proposed algorithm. The results show that the algorithm outperforms the random volume over ground (RVoG) model by 18% and 16.7% in forest height estimation for the Mabounie and Krycklan study sites, respectively. Full article

Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) retrieval using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter has received extensive attention. The water cloud model (WCM), because of its simplicity and physical significance, has been one of the most commonly used models for estimating forest AGB using SAR backscatter. Nevertheless, forest AGB estimation using the WCM is usually based on simplified assumptions and empirical fitting, leading to results that tend to overestimate or underestimate. Moreover, the physical connection between the model and the polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) is not established, which leads to the limitation of the inversion scale. In this paper, based on the fully polarimetric SAR data from the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) Phased Array-type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR-2), the relative contributions of the three major scattering mechanisms were first analyzed in a hilly area of southern China. On this basis, the traditional WCM was extended by considering the secondary scattering mechanism. Then, to establish the direct relationship between the vegetation scattering mechanism and forest AGB, a new relationship equation between the PolSAR decomposition model and the improved water cloud model (I-WCM) was constructed without the help of external data. Finally, a nonlinear iterative method was used to estimate the forest AGB. The results show that volume scattering is the dominant mechanism, accounting for more than 60%. Double-bounce scattering accounts for the smallest fraction, but still about 10%, which means that the contribution of the double-bounce scattering component is not negligible in forested areas because of the strong penetration capability of the long-wave SAR. The modified method provides a correlation coefficient R² of 0.665 and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 21.902, which is an improvement of 36.42% compared to the traditional fitting method. Moreover, it enables the extraction of forest parameters at the pix scale using PolSAR data without the need for low-resolution external data and is thus helpful for high-resolution mapping of forest AGB. Full article