As part of a Tanzanian-Norwegian cooperation project on Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) for REDD+, 2007-2011 Cand L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter data from Envisat ASAR and ALOS Palsar, respectively, have been processed, analysed and used for forest and forest change mapping over a study side in Liwale District in Lindi Region, Tanzania. Land cover observations fro...

To address the need for timely information on newly deforested areas at medium resolution scale, we introduce a Bayesian approach to combine SAR and optical time series for near real-time deforestation detection. Once a new image of either of the input time series is available, the conditional probability of deforestation is computed using Bayesian updating, and deforestation events are indicat...

Snow cover mapping is a very important parameter for snowmelt runoff modeling and forecasting. Snow cover information is also useful for managing transportation and avalanche forecasting. This study will discuss the capability of full polarimetric L-band ALOS PALSAR data for snow classification. Therefore, Polarimetric decomposition and the complex Wishart classifier will be applied on ALOSPALS...

The progress at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties 15 (COP15) to include the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in the post-Kyoto UNFCCC agreement manifested the demand for reliable remote sensing data streams to support tropical nation’s establishment of measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems to track forest carbon. ALOS...

The main objective of the project ”Monitoring of mining induced surface deformation” (ALOS-RA-94) is to evaluate multi-temporal PALSAR data for land surface deformation monitoring, using interferometric techniques. Differential interferometry using PALSAR data over several mining sites in Germany, Poland and Czech Republic, as well as over alpine landslides in Switzerland and Italy was used to ...

The purpose of this study is to map wetlands using multi-polarimetric and polarimetric analysis of ALOS Palsar data in coastal North Carolina. Radar sensor offers reliable acquisition of wetlands which are mandated, by Congress, to be mapped every ten years. Radar data products were generated using Wishart supervised (HH-HVVV) and Wishart unsupervised (entropy and dominant scattering mechanism)...

In the framework of the JAXA Kyoto and Carbon (K&C) project, blanket and systematic observations were acquired by the PALSAR synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in FBD dual-pol mode over those ecosystems of the world, which are of importance for climate change studies, carbon science, environment conservation and related environmental treaties. Starting from these observations, the role of JRC was t...

This paper discusses stem volume retrieval based on inversion of SAR data, and proposes a new robust inversion approach. The method used employs model fitting with an inverted semi-empirical boreal forest SAR model, and takes advantage of the multitemporal aspect in order to improve the stability and accuracy of stem volume estimation. The approach is demonstrated using multitemporal dual-pol S...

We propose using satellite remote sensing technology with a modified damage detection model based on the regression discriminant function for severe building damage ratios as a method to quickly estimate damaged areas due to tsunamis anywhere in the world. The model was developed using a data set from JERS-1/SAR images of the aftermath of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and its detailed ground-truth d...

We have been studying coand postseismic displacements from large earthquakes since mid-2006, using ALOS PALSAR images acquired before and after these events. Due to its wavelength, coherence is high even in heavily vegetated areas or steep ranges. We can estimate slip distribution of these earthquakes based on the observed interferograms using a nonlinear inversion scheme. So far, we could not ...