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Roman Guliaev (German Aerospace Center (DLR))18/11/2026, 09:30
ESA’s BIOMASS, launched on April 29, 2025, able to acquire fully polarimetric, interferometric and tomographic information, enables for the first time large scale Pol-InSAR forest height inversion at P-band. The spatial baseline distribution of BIOMASS is optimized for tropical forest height retrieval and tomographic (reflectivity) profile reconstruction, while the satellite’s short revisit...
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Oliver Cartus (GAMMA Remote Sensing)18/11/2026, 09:50
Carbon markets, operating on the principles of emission trading and carbon offsetting, offer market-based incentives to reduce emissions and to adopt low-carbon practices. New rules from leading registries such as Verra, Gold Standard, and Isometric are advancing digital Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) systems to enhance transparency and reduce monitoring costs in carbon offset...
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Wenyu Yang (University of Napoli Parthenope)18/11/2026, 10:10
Forest aboveground biomass (AGB) is an important indicator of forest carbon storage and plays a key role in carbon monitoring and forest management. The increasing availability of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations from Sentinel-1 and NISAR provides new opportunities for large-scale AGB estimation. In this study, a physics-based AGB retrieval framework is developed using...
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Lars Ulander (Chalmers University of Technology)18/11/2026, 10:30
Biomass is the seventh Earth Explorer mission of the European Space Agency. Its primary objective is to reduce uncertainties in global carbon stocks of the terrestrial biosphere as well as the corresponding carbon fluxes caused by land use change (LULUCF, mainly deforestation) and land uptake (mainly forest regrowth). To achieve this goal, Biomass will generate yearly and near-global maps of...
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Daniel Carcereri (German Aerospace Center (DLR))18/11/2026, 11:10
Accurate characterization and continuous monitoring of forest canopy height are essential to guide conservation efforts, evaluate temporal stability, and support climatological analyses under increasing anthropogenic pressures. While deep learning (DL) models applied to interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) data have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance, their...
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ayoub hamza18/11/2026, 11:30
Detecting changes between polarimetric radar observations is important for monitoring the temporal evolution of the biogeophysical properties of natural scenes. The long wavelength of BIOMASS’s fully polarimetric P-band radar provides sensitivity to forest properties and their change over time.
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Under the standard complex Gaussian model for single-look complex SAR data, polarimetric covariance... -
Noelia Romero-Puig (German Aerospace Center (DLR) / Hisdesat)18/11/2026, 11:50
Understanding forest structural dynamics is crucial for accurate forest biomass estimation, ecosystem monitoring, and carbon cycle modelling. The launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) BIOMASS mission on April 29, 2025, opened a new era as the first spaceborne P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) continuously operating in quad-polarimetric, multi-baseline interferometric, and tomographic...
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Mr Marc Herrera-Giménez18/11/2026, 12:10Forestry
This work analyses the possibility of estimating forest tree height (TH) at high and low spatial resolution using Machine Learning (ML) models and multi-source Earth Observation (EO) data. Estimating forest biophysical parameters is a must to quantify climate change effects, and the challenge with EO is the complexity and volume of data. Building on the observation that a direct relation...
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Matteo Pardini (German Aerospace Center (DLR))18/11/2026, 14:00
Since November 2025 the ESA BIOMASS Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mission is acquiring multi-baseline full-pol P-band data in a 3 day repeat pass mode enabling the reconstruction of the full 3D distribution of the backscattered radar power (reflectivity) by means of tomographic (TomoSAR) techniques. In this context, BIOMASS TomoSAR reconstructions provide for the first time the unique...
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Theresa Leistner (Department of Environmental and Energy Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden)18/11/2026, 14:20
Understanding temporal variations in L-band forest backscatter remains challenging because the conventional SAR observations represent a mixture of canopy, branch, trunk and ground scattering contributions from multiple trees within a single resolution cell. High-resolution radar tomography provides an opportunity to separate these contributions and investigate forest dynamics at the scale of...
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Laurent Ferro Famil (ISAE-SUPAERO & CESBIO)18/11/2026, 14:40
SAR tomography (TomoSAR) is a powerful technique for characterizing natural volumes over large areas, as it enables three-dimensional mapping of reflectivity by coherently combining two-dimensional SAR images acquired along slightly shifted trajectories. SAR systems operating at low frequencies can be efficiently used in tomographic mode to characterize the vertical structure of densely...
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Laurent Ferro-Famil (ISAE-SUAPERO & CESBIO, University of Toulouse, France)18/11/2026, 15:20
Forest SAR tomography is a key tool for monitoring biomass. It involves processing a stack of coherent SAR images to extract various observables related to biomass. One challenge of forest SAR tomography is that the shape of the forest’s reflectivity profile is unknown. Typically, a prior is introduced; for example, the reflectivity profile is assumed to be Gaussian or an exponential. However,...
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Alberto Alonso-Gonzalez (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC))18/11/2026, 15:40
Polarimetric SAR Interferometry (PolInSAR) merges polarimetric SAR, offering the ability to distinguish between different scattering types within individual resolution cells, and interferometric SAR, which provides sensitivity to the vertical distribution of scatterers.
The PolInSAR two-layer model represents the signal as a combination of ground and volume contributions and has proven...
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Dr Marta Bottani (CESBIO (Université de Toulouse))18/11/2026, 16:00
Timely and accurate monitoring of deforestation is critical for managing tropical forests, yet individual Earth observation sensors have inherent limitations. Multispectral imagery provides rich spectral information on vegetation properties but is often hindered by cloud cover and limited canopy penetration. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) complements optical data by being largely insensitive...
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Giovanni Costa (RIDE Lab - Politecnico di Milano)19/11/2026, 09:30
This work introduces the Ground--Latent Interferometric Model (GLIM), a physics-based representation of the interferometric response to soil moisture variations building upon the formulation in [2]. GLIM represents the observed response as the superposition of two physically distinct scattering mechanisms: a temporally stable Ground contribution, providing a common interferometric phase...
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zihao wang (Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC))19/11/2026, 09:50
Soil moisture (SM) is a critical variable in hydrological, ecological, and agricultural domains, playing a pivotal role in irrigation management, drought monitoring, and crop yield prediction. While in-situ measurements provide highly accurate SM data, they are costly and spatially limited. Remote sensing techniques enable large-area monitoring, but current satellite SM products, with spatial...
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Luc Pienkoß (Deutschland/ Universität Rostock)19/11/2026, 10:10
Peatland condition is a key indicator of ecosystem integrity and carbon storage potential, making reliable monitoring of degradation processes essential at regional to national scales. Mire breathing—the cyclic surface motion driven by hydrological dynamics—serves as an important proxy for peatland degradation. Drained or degraded peatlands typically exhibit weak oscillatory behaviour combined...
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Jose Luis Bueso19/11/2026, 10:30
Soil moisture is the amount of water contained in the unsaturated soil zone and is a key variable controlling plant water uptake, crop yields, groundwater recharge, and land–atmosphere exchanges of heat and carbon. Accurate knowledge of its spatial and temporal distribution is therefore important for applications such as precision agriculture, drought monitoring, and flood...
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Chiara Telli19/11/2026, 11:10
Monitoring soil moisture in Alpine regions is essential for understanding hydrological dynamics, drought events, and the impacts of climate change in mountain environments. However, reliable monitoring remains challenging due to strong spatial heterogeneity, complex topography, sparse in situ observations, and rapidly changing land-surface conditions. While spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar...
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Sebastiano Pignato (University Of Stirling)19/11/2026, 11:30
Continuous water-level monitoring in shallow coastal lagoons and wetlands is essential for ecological protection and water resource management. In extensive wetland systems such as the Danube Delta, ground gauges are sparse and often difficult to install and maintain. While satellite altimetry provides only limited coverage because its measurements are restricted to narrow ground tracks, SAR...
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Paulina Swiatek (TU Delft)19/11/2026, 11:50
The summer of 2026 was exceptionally dry and warm across Europe, and its ecological impact is now becoming measurable. At the ICOS ecosystem station in Brasschaat, Belgium (ICOS code Be-Bra), eddy-covariance measurements from the 40 m tower indicate that canopy photosynthesis fell roughly 19% below the long-term average....
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Giuliano Ramat (IFAC CNR)19/11/2026, 12:10
The Soil Moisture Ensemble Method (SMEM) is a project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) aimed at enhancing both the accuracy and spatial detail of soil moisture (SM) and vegetation water content (VWC) retrievals derived from multi-frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations. The initiative addresses some of the major limitations affecting current retrieval approaches,...
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Bjorn Rommen19/11/2026, 14:00
Overview
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Dr Urs Wegmüller (Gamma Remote Sensing AG)19/11/2026, 14:20
The coherence is a parameter that characterizes the noise of the interferometric phase, as well as the SNR improvement achieved with multi-image filtering or averaging of backscatter images. Our main interest relates to the fact that the coherence depends on specific characteristics of the imaged scatterers, so that it can support applications as land-use classification and bio- and...
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Youssra EL BENNIOUI (ISAE-SUPAERO)19/11/2026, 14:40
Mapping features lying beneath a forest cover using SAR measurements represents a major challenge, due to the response of the overlying vegetation volume, wave attenuation caused by propagation through the forest canopy, and high-intensity scattering mechanisms occurring at the ground level, which mask ground contributions and prevent direct interpretation of conventional SAR imagery....
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Barbara Widhalm (b.geos)19/11/2026, 15:00
Arctic wildfires can trigger long-lasting changes in permafrost landscapes, but the magnitude and persistence of these responses depend strongly on local environmental conditions. Here, we investigate post-fire landscape dynamics across North American Arctic tundra using a space-for-time approach, comparing fire scars of different ages along a gradient of permafrost conditions and ground...
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NAOMI PETRUSHEVSKY19/11/2026, 15:40
The launch of the European Space Agency’s BIOMASS mission, the first spaceborne P- band SAR mission, opens new opportunities for characterizing forest ecosystems from a low-frequency radar perspective. The long wavelength of P-band signals enables significant penetration through the forest canopy, providing information on the vertical distribution of above-ground biomass and on the underlying...
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Jiachen Li (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya)19/11/2026, 16:00
Quad-polarimetric (QP) SAR reconstruction from reduced-polarimetric observations can extend the usability of compact- and dual-polarimetric (CP/DP) data while preserving key polarimetric information for scattering analysis and downstream applications. This presentation evaluate QP reconstruction through AI in different aspects, including input modes, output parameterizations, and loss...
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Titouan Tyack (CESBIO)19/11/2026, 16:20
Azimuth terrain slopes induce a rotation of the polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) response of environements, which may significantly affect the retrieval of bio- and geo-physical properties through polarimetric approaches that do not compensate for this effect. Besides its obvious use for polarimetric data compensation, the Polarization Orientation Angle (POA) may be employed to characterize the...
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Jessica Rosenqvist (solo Earth Observation)19/11/2026, 16:40
Wetlands are multi-function ecosystems which store surface water and regulate water flows, they drive evatransporation and precipitation, and purify and replenish groundwater aquifers. Wetlands moreover constitute biodiversity hotspots for terrestrial, avian and aquatic life, and consequently for the livelihood of people. – Where there are wetlands, there is life.
Wetlands are...
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Prof. Irena Hajnsek (German Aerospace Center / ETH Zurich)20/11/2026, 09:30
Water management for irrigation is an essential activity especially in agricultural areas or where water is scarce. Water storage in the soil affects the vapour transpiration but also its heat storage capacity, its thermal conductivity and the energy separation between latent and sensible heat fluxes. From a hydrological perspective, soil moisture links the partitioning of rainfall into runoff...
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Sofia Rossi (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) – Istituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell'Ambiente (IREA), Bari, Italy)20/11/2026, 09:50
Monitoring crop conditions is essential for forecasting agricultural production and supporting food security. Two key variables for this purpose are Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) and Vegetation Water Content (VWC). VWC quantifies the amount of water stored in the above-ground biomass per unit area and is commonly measured through destructive field sampling. While accurate, this approach is...
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Pietro Grassi (Politecnico di Milano)20/11/2026, 10:10
HydroDrone is an ESA-funded UAV-based C-band SAR campaign designed to investigate short-term temporal decorrelation over vegetated scenes across timescales ranging from tens of seconds to minutes and several hours. Characterizing the temporal evolution of vegetation coherence at these timescales is important for understanding the dynamics of vegetated scatterers and their impact on...
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Dr Giulia Graldi (Eurac Research)20/11/2026, 10:10
Reliable estimates of above-ground biomass in mountain grasslands are crucial for assessing production losses and supporting index-based insurance schemes, particularly as climate change causes more frequent drought events increasingly threatening alpine agriculture. However, biomass retrieval from SAR imagery remains challenging in mountainous regions because complex terrain introduces severe...
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Alexandre Becker Campos (German Aerospace Center (DLR))20/11/2026, 11:10
Accurate and spatially comprehensive monitoring of changes in glacier elevation is crucial for understanding glaciological processes, such as snow depth and geodetic mass balance, as well as snow and ice dynamics. In-situ measurements, while precise, are spatially limited and logistically challenging. Alternatively, LiDAR sensors can provide highly accurate measurements but are constrained by...
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Luca Mantuano (Politecnico di Milano)20/11/2026, 11:30
Snowpack characterization is of significant interest for hydrological and climate applications, particularly in mountainous environments, where conventional remote sensing techniques may suffer from limited spatial resolution. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) tomography provides the capability to resolve scattering contributions along the vertical direction and therefore represents a promising...
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Hossein Aghababaei (ITC, university of Twente.)20/11/2026, 11:50
Long-wavelength synthetic aperture radar (SAR) missions provide a unique opportunity to investigate changes within penetrable natural media. This study introduces a closure-phase-based framework for evaluating scene stability and scattering complexity using multi-temporal SAR observations.
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For long-wavelength SAR systems, measurements over natural media such as forests, snow, and ice can... -
Francesco Luca Ferrari (ETH Zurich)20/11/2026, 12:10
Glaciers are among the most sensitive indicators of climate change and play a key role in regional hydrology. Over the past decades, Alpine glaciers have experienced accelerated mass loss, characterized by significant spatial variability in elevation-change rates (GLAMOS, 2025). SAR interferometry provides a unique opportunity for glacier monitoring by enabling consistent elevation...
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Isabel Pieruschka (ETH Zürich)20/11/2026, 13:30
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based Earth observation techniques provide an effective means of monitoring glacier changes over large spatial and extended temporal scales. The Swiss Alps offer an excellent opportunity for validating remote-sensing approaches to glacier monitoring due to the high availabilty of independent glacier observations. In particular, the Great Aletsch Glacier – the...
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Sara-Patricia Schlenk (Microwaves and Radar Institute, German Aerospace Center (DLR); Institute of Microwaves and Photonics, Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nuremberg)20/11/2026, 13:50
Microwave remote sensing has become an indispensable tool for monitoring the polar regions, as signal penetration into dry snow and ice makes Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensitive to subsurface structures [1]. This sensitivity generally increases toward longer wavelengths, providing access to deeper englacial scattering contributions [1,3,4]. ESA’s BIOMASS mission, launched in April 2025,...
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Francesco Banda (aresys)20/11/2026, 14:10
The characterization of ice structure and dynamic processes is essential for improving our understanding of the cryosphere and its role in the global water cycle [1]. The accelerating loss of ice masses and their contribution to sea-level rise call for increasingly extensive observations of polar regions. The limited spatial and temporal coverage and difficult accessibility of in situ...
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Yan YuanPoster SessionPOSTER
Recent studies have demonstrated that non-zero closure phases ($\Phi_{123}$), obtained by circularly summing three interferometric phases, can arise from phase noise and geophysical signals [1]. Existing literature identifies three mechanisms contributing to geophysical closure phases: changes in the dielectric properties of the medium, including soil moisture variations, wet biomass...
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Nathan Paillou, Philippe PaillouPoster SessionPOSTER
The recently launched BIOMASS P-band SAR starts delivering images over Sahara. While it shows numerous subsurface structures under aeolian sand thanks to its long wavelength penetration capabilities, big linear sand dunes in eastern Sahara exhibit very unusual radar-bright signatures. We compared both ascending and descending BIOMASS scenes of a linear dune located in south-east Libya and used...
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Victor Cazcarra-Bes (University of Alicante)Poster SessionPOSTER
The ESA BIOMASS mission provides spaceborne P-band fully polarimetric SAR observations primarily designed to characterize forests and their contribution to the carbon cycle [1]. Although it is not its primary goal, these observations also offer an opportunity to explore agricultural applications, for which the sensitivity and usefulness of P-band remain insufficiently understood. Radar...
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Nathan PaillouPoster SessionPOSTER
Monitoring forest ecosystems using spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar generally relies on sun-synchronous missions that observe a given area at approximately the same local time. Consequently, the influence of the daily cycle on the radar response of vegetation remains poorly documented from space. In contrast, TeLEOS-2 operates in a near-equatorial orbit with an inclination of approximately...
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Mr Clinton Nkolokosa (University of Stirling)Poster SessionPOSTER
The Lower Shire Valley floodplain in Malawi supports a protected wetland, wildlife reserves and a major sugarcane irrigation scheme. Its soils, water and vegetation are central to Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, 6 and 13. Yet they are increasingly exposed to cyclone-driven floods, drought and anthropogenic pressure. Previous satellite sensors have been limited by cloud cover (optical...
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Lilian SzuterPoster SessionPOSTER
Synthetic Aperture Radar tomography (TomoSAR) provides a powerful framework for retrieving the vertical distribution of radar scattering within forest canopies. P-band observations are particularly attractive for forest applications because of their ability to deeply penetrate the vegetation layer, allowing to sense both canopy and ground contributions. While TomoSAR imaging has been...
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Luis Aguilar (CentraleSupelec)Poster SessionPOSTER
Forest parameter estimation via satellite remote sensing techniques offers substantial advantages compared to more traditional methods. Global coverage and fast revisit times have enabled constant monitoring of forest conditions, leading to robust datasets of remote sensing imagery.
Machine Learning has become an important tool when analyzing these increasingly large datasets, and even more...
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Dr Marta Bottani (CESBIO, Université de Toulouse)Poster SessionPOSTER
The European Space Agency’s BIOMASS mission provides the first global observations of forests at P-band, offering unprecedented sensitivity to vegetation structure and above-ground biomass. While primarily designed for biomass estimation, the sensitivity of P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations to the vertical structure of vegetation also opens new opportunities for detecting...
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Andreu Mas (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya UPC)Poster SessionPOSTER
Characterizing the short-term temporal evolution of SAR coherence across frequency bands and polarization channels is important for interpreting radar observations of vegetated scenes and for defining suitable acquisition strategies for land-monitoring applications.
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This work investigates these dependencies using observations of Mediterranean forest and vineyard scenes acquired with a... -
Ms Saskia Brose (German Aerospace Center (DLR))Poster SessionPOSTER
Ice loss from melting glacier and ice sheets is the dominant driver of sea-level change. To better estimate essential climate variables such as sea-level rise, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations can help us to understand the internal structures of ice masses while constraining and advancing models of ice-sheet and glacier mass loss. Polarimetric and interferometric SAR can...
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Esther Mas Sanz (Institute of Environmental Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich, Switzerland)Poster SessionPOSTER
SAR tomography is a remote sensing technique that uses multibaseline interferometric acquisitions to reconstruct a three-dimensional (3D) image of the target region (Fornaro 2014). An extra layer of information can be added if using fully polarimetric images, providing data on scattering mechanisms present in the resolution cell.
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KAPRI is a ground-based real-aperture (RAR),... -
Florine Killemaes (Ghent University)Poster SessionPOSTER
Seasonal snow in mountain regions is an essential source of water. The monitoring of snow properties, such as snow depth (SD) or snow water equivalent (SWE), can benefit a range of applications, including water resource management, flood prediction and renewable energy production. A promising remote sensing method for the monitoring of mountain snow uses Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)...
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Oscar Jessup (University of Stirling)Poster SessionPOSTER
Biomass crops contribute to climate change mitigation through both fossil fuel substitution and soil carbon sequestration. Among these, Miscanthus a fast-growing C4 perennial grass native to East Asia is well suited to UK growth conditions owing to its high productivity, perenniality, and climatic adaptability. Perennial energy crop planting in the UK is projected to expand by 30,000 ha...
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Ruofan Jiang (Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, NL)Poster SessionPOSTER
Perennial rice is a rice cultivar that can regenerate from retained stubble in several seasons after first harvest. This distinctive post-harvest regrowth pattern presents new challenges for satellite-based phenological monitoring. Optical remote sensing is effective for characterizing canopy greenness, chlorophyll-related variation, and seasonal growth trajectories; however, its ability to...
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Fergus McDermid (Student)Poster SessionPOSTER
Peatlands are globally important habitats, comprising a small fraction of the terrestrial surface yet storing large quantities of carbon. Predominantly found at high latitudes, northern hemisphere peatlands have received significantly more attention in scientific literature than their southern counterparts. The peatlands of Southern Patagonia are poorly studied, and accurate maps of their...
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Jorge Jorge Ruiz (Finnish Metereological Institute)Poster SessionPOSTER
Seasonal snow is a dynamic component of the cryosphere whose physical properties evolve continuously through accumulation, metamorphism, melt–refreeze events, and ablation. Active microwave observations can be sensitive to these changes, but the radar response depends strongly on frequency, incidence angles, polarization, and snow conditions. Multifrequency and high-temporal-resolution...
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