ENVISAT ASAR in disaster management and humanitarian relief

Space-borne SAR has a good potential to support disaster management and humanitarian relief projects thanks to its all-weather capability, its capabilities for change detection, the large existing data archives, and, of course, the geometric and thematic information content of the images. Basic processing techniques, including precision image co-registration, multi-temporal analysis, terrain corrected geocoding, interferometry, and radargrammetry, are well developed and operational. This contribution is an assessment of possible roles of space-borne SAR and in particular ENVISAT ASAR in disaster management and humanitarian relief projects. Relevant additional functionality of ASAR as compared to ERS-1/2 comes from the beam-steering, multipolarization, larger incidence angle, wide-angle, and scan-SAR capability.