Recent advances in SAR remote sensing: “Multimodal POLinSAR imaging with applications to remote sensing of the terrestrial covers and the monitoring of environmental stress changes”

Land cover monitoring is one of the most potential applications of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) sensing and so is Repeat-Pass Polarimetric-Interferometric SAR (RP-DIFF-POL-IN-SAR) stress-change assessment by air/high-altitude/space-borne SAR sensor deployment. Provided fully polarimetric SAR information can be made available, a plethora of novel POLSAR matrix decomposition methods can be implemented for recovering rather precise scattering contributions from isolated and distributed scattering scenarios, and so can rather exact environmental changes from consecutive repeat-pass observations at 1 m resolution from air and from space. With the recent launches of the fully polarimetric satellites JAXA-ALOS (PAL-SAR-L-Band), the DLR TerraSAR-X (X-Band) and of RADASAT-2 (C-Band), a new era in space imaging of the terrestrial terrain and ocean surfaces has arrived providing unforeseen advantages.