SAR for Agriculture: Advances, Problems and Prospects

P. Ferrazzoli

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the state of the art in SAR data use for agricultural applications, discuss the main problems and give suggestions for future work.
The paper is introduced with some short historical notes about the evolution of ground based, airborne and spaceborne radar observations, as well as about the advances in scattering modeling.
Then, the paper considers three aspects of the retrieval problem, corresponding to three fundamental steps:
i) identification of a convenient radar configuration;
ii) development of reliable relationships between backscatter coefficient and agricultural variables (direct problem);
iii) retrieval in the strict sense (inverse problem).
For each of the three topics, the important recent advances are summarized and the author’s point of view about the state of the art is given.

Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Retrieval of Bio- and Geophysical Parameters from SAR Data for Land Applications,
11-14 September, 2001 in Sheffield, UK.
Edited by A. Wilson, scientific coordination by S. Quegan.
ESA SP-475, Noordwijk, Netherlands: ESA Publications Division, ISBN 92-9092-741-0, 2002, p. 47 - 56
Bibliographic Code: 2002ESASP.475...47F

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