Forests are also the most significant onshore stores of carbon, helping to absorb excess carbon dioxide that would otherwise increase global warming. So the Kyoto Protocol, about to come into force, allows nations with forested areas to set them against carbon emission. Accurate quantification of total forest biomass would provide verification for Kyoto and also shrink current uncertainties within climate change models.
The campaign took place during last November and December. Details of INDREX-II were presented during a workshop in ESA's European Space Research Institute (ESRIN). Some 135 researchers from 27 countries attended the POLINSAR 2005 event, named for a relatively new radar technology called synthetic aperture radar (SAR) polarimetric interferometry (Pol-InSAR).
Participants in the weeklong workshop heard that other potential applications of the technology included monitoring of urban areas, ice fields and agriculture.
What is Pol-InSAR?
Radar has come a long way since its initial development for range and direction finding in the run-up to World War Two. Today satellites such as ESA's Envisat routinely scan the Earth with radar signals, building up highly detailed surface images - even through clouds and local darkness out of reflected radar backscatter.
In addition to simply imaging a site, two radar images of the same location acquired from close to the same position in space can be combined together using a technique called SAR interferometry (InSAR). Working on the same basis as stereoscopic vision, a dual image InSAR dual-image combinations throw up colourful interference pattern 'fringes' that resemble contour lines on the map.
These fringes contain topographic height information that can be used to generate highly accurate digita
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Contact: Mariangela D'Acunto
mariangela.dacunto@esa.int
39-069-418-0856
European Space Agency
1-Feb-2005