BIOSAR 2008: Final Report

Abstract

This document describes the radar data acquired during the BIOSAR campaign carried out in October 2008 in Northern Sweden. The main objective of the BIOSAR campaign is summarised and a description of the flight campaign and the acquired airborne and ground data are given. In the frame of its Earth Observation Envelope Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA), BIOSAR supports geophysical algorithm development, their calibration and validation as well as the simulation of future space-borne Earth Observation missions. The next generation of ESA Earth Observation satellites include a series of innovative satellites dedicated to a specific application. BIOSAR supports the current selected candidate Earth Explorer Mission BIOMASS. The main objective of BIOMASS is the estimation of forest biomass in order to support carbon modelling using longer wavelength. The BIOSAR 2008 campaign collects in-situ and airborne SAR in support of decisions being taken on satellite instrument configurations for the BIOMASS satellite mission. In addition it provides an important database for the study of longer term mission concepts. While the BIOSAR 2007 campaign collected data with the objective to investigate the effect of temporal decorrelation at P-band with 100MHz and 6MHz bandwidth in southern Sweden, BIOSAR 2008 recorded data at boreal forests with strong topographic effects in northern Sweden to investigate the effect on forest height estimation and radar backscatter signal variation.