Speaker
Description
The European Space Agency (ESA) BIOMASS mission will be the first operational development of a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in space. Compared to all previous SAR mission, BIOMASS mission offers major advances by incorporating three distinct techniques, i.e., SAR Polarimetry (PolSAR), Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (Pol-InSAR), and SAR Tomography (TomoSAR) to provide information on forest properties. The primary objective of BIOMASS mission is to generate the global distribution of forest above‐ground biomass (AGB). This product can reduce the uncertainties in carbon stocks and carbon fluxes associated with Land Use Change, forest degradation, and forest regrowth. In addition, this mission has several secondary objectives, which are mapping subsurface geology, measuring terrain topography under dense vegetation, and estimating glacier and ice sheet velocities.
The Project Office BIOMASS has been established with the aim of coordinating the scientific dissemination of the ESA BIOMASS Mission. On one hand, the Project Office BIOMASS is dedicated to aligning with BIOMASS mission objectives towards advancing the current understanding the role of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics within the context of the global carbon cycle under climate change. For example, the project works on quantifying the terrestrial carbon balance over the decadal scales which plays an important role in mitigating the atmospheric CO2 concentration, and characterizing the link between spatial variability in high-resolution biomass and disturbance dynamics and land use change, which represents key prediction challenges in Earth System Models. On the other hand, the coordination activities by the Project Office BIOMASS include the organization of regular scientific workshops dedicated to diverse topics related to biomass. To date, ten such workshops have been conducted. Furthermore, the project has initiated on-site training programs, i.e., organizing a summer school, which aims to train and engage the young research communities in the upcoming BIOMASS mission objectives. In addition, the Project Office BIOMASS has conducted a survey to obtain the data requirements of various biomass data users, including those engaged in remote sensing, Earth system modelling, and forest monitoring. Subsequently, a gap analysis has been drafted based on this survey, proposing approaches to bridge mission objectives with expectations from the biomass data users.
