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The primary objective of the European Space Agency's 7 th Earth Explorer mission, BIOMASS, is to determine the worldwide distribution of forest above-ground biomass (AGB) in order to reduce the major uncertainties in calculations of carbon stocks and fluxes associated with the terrestrial biosphere, including carbon fluxes associated with Land Use Change, forest degradation and forest regrowth. To meet this objective it will carry, for the first time in space, a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Three main products will be provided: global maps of both AGB and forest height, with a spatial resolution of 200 m, and maps of severe forest disturbance at 50 m resolution (where "global" is to be understood as subject to Space Object tracking radar restrictions). After launch in 2022, there will be a 3-month commissioning phase, followed by a 14-month phase during which there will be global coverage by SAR tomography. In the succeeding interferometric phase, global polarimetric interferometry Pol-InSAR coverage will be achieved every 7 months up to the end of the 5-year mission. Both Pol-InSAR and TomoSAR will be used to eliminate scattering from the ground (both direct and double bounce backscatter) in forests. In dense tropical forests AGB can then be estimated from the remaining volume scattering using non-linear inversion of a backscattering model. Airborne campaigns in the tropics also indicate that AGB is highly correlated with the backscatter from around 30 m above the ground, as measured by tomography. In contrast, double bounce scattering appears to carry important information about the AGB of boreal forests, so ground cancellation may not be appropriate and the best approach for such forests remains to be finalized. Several methods to exploit these new data in carbon cycle calculations have already been demonstrated. In addition, major mutual gains will be made by combining BIOMASS data with data from other missions that will measure forest biomass, structure, height and change, including the NASA Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar deployed on the International Space Station after its launch in December 2018, and the NASA-ISRO NISAR Land S-band SAR, due for launch in 2022. More generally, space-based measurements of biomass are a core component of a carbon cycle observation and modelling strategy developed by the Group on Earth Observations. Secondary objectives of the mission include imaging of sub-surface geological structures in arid environments, generation of a true Digital Terrain Model without biases caused by forest cover, and measurement of glacier and icesheet velocities. In addition, the operations Here Eff denotes fossil fuel emissions; Elb is net land biospheric emissions, comprising both Land Use 94 Change and ecosystem dynamics, and including alterations to biomass stocks linked to process 95 responses to climate change, nitrogen deposition and rising atmospheric CO2; ΔCatmos is the change in 96 atmospheric CO2; and Uland and Uocean are net average uptake by t...

During the last decade, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) became an indispensable source of information in Earth observation. This has been possible mainly due to the current trend toward higher spatial resolution and novel imaging modes. A major driver for this development has been and still is the airborne SAR technology, which is usually ahead of the capabilities of spaceborne sensors by several years. Today's airborne sensors are capable of delivering high-quality SAR data with decimeter resolution and allow the development of novel approaches in data analysis and information extraction from SAR. In this paper, a review about the abilities and needs of today's very high-resolution airborne SAR sensors is given, based on and summarizing the longtime experience of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) with airborne SAR technology and its applications. A description of the specific requirements of high-resolution airborne data processing is presented, followed by an extensive overview of emerging applications of high-resolution SAR. In many cases, information extraction from high-resolution airborne SAR imagery has achieved a mature level, turning SAR technology more and more into an operational tool. Such abilities, which are today mostly limited to airborne SAR, might become typical in the next generation of spaceborne SAR missions.

TanDEM-X (TerraSAR-X add-on for Digital Elevation Measurements) is an innovative formation flying radar mission that opens a new era in spaceborne radar remote sensing. The primary objective is the acquisition of a global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) with unprecedented accuracy (12 m horizontal and 2 m vertical resolution). This goal is achieved by extending the TerraSAR-X synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mission by a second, TerraSAR-X like satellite (TDX) flying in close formation with TerraSAR-X (TSX). Both satellites form together a large singlepass SAR interferometer with the opportunity for flexible baseline selection. This enables the acquisition of highly accurate cross-track interferograms without the inherent accuracy limitations imposed by repeat-pass interferometry due to temporal decorrelation and atmospheric disturbances. Besides the primary goal of the mission, several secondary mission objectives based on along-track interferometry as well as new bistatic and multistatic SAR techniques have been defined, representing an important and innovative asset of the TanDEM-X mission. TanDEM-X is implemented in the framework of a public-private partnership between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and EADS Astrium GmbH. The TanDEM-X mission was successfully launched in June 2010 and started operational data acquisition in December 2010. This paper provides an overview of the TanDEM-X mission and summarizes its actual status and performance. Furthermore, results from several scientific radar experiments will be presented that show the great potential of future formation flying interferometric SAR missions to serve novel remote sensing applications.