Initiating the ALOS Kyoto & Carbon Initiative

The ALOS Kyoto & Carbon Initiative is an international endeavour initialized by NASDA, with the main objective to support information needs raised by the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol and by the international global carbon cycle science community, by provision of systematic, consistent, repetitive and regional scale data of the global forest cover. Of central importance for the Initiative is a Dedicated Data Acquisition Strategy for the polarimetric Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) sensor onboard the Advanced Land Observation Satellite (ALOS) satellite, which, as a major project output, is foreseen to result in an extensive data archive with consistent time series of dual-polarization (HH/HV) PALSAR data over any given land area on the Earth. Tentative plans for derived data products include regional scale image mosaics, maps of annual forest change, wetland flood distribution/duration, and rice cultivation