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From its launch in 2006, the phased array L-band synthetic aperture radar (PALSAR) onboard the advanced land observing satellite (ALOS) has acquired many dual-polarized (FBD) images with a 70-km swath width, aiming to produce spatially consistent coverage over tropical rainforest. This paper investigates the relevancy of PALSAR orthorectified FBD product at 50-m resolution for regional land cover classification by the support vector machines (SVM). Our test site is the Riau province, Sumatra island, Indonesia, known to hold vast area of natural peatland forest with an extreme biodiversity threatened by industrial deforestation. Since it is demonstrated the radiometric information (HH and HV channels) cannot be solely used to achieve a good classification, the spatial information in these orthorectified data is investigated. A new tool using the recursive feature elimination SVM-based process and the textural Haralick's parameters is introduced. The real contribution of textures within the land cover classification can be understood. A small set of textural parameters is determined at local scale while being optimal for the land cover discrimination. The SVM-based classifier is carried out across the whole Riau province and its results are compared with a Landsat-based estimation. The agreement is over 70% with six classes and 86% for the natural forest map. These results are remarkable since only one PALSAR FBD product is used and this assessment is performed on more than 40 million pixels. The results confirm the high potential of the PALSAR sensor for forest monitoring at regional, if not global scale.

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The Sentinel‐1 mission is part of the European Copernicus program aiming at providing observations for Land, Marine and Atmosphere Monitoring, Emergency Management, Security and Climate Change. It is a constellation of two (Sentinel‐1 A and B) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. The SAR wave mode (WV) routinely collects high‐resolution SAR images of the ocean surface during day and night and through clouds. In this study, a subset of more than 37,000 SAR images is labelled corresponding to ten geophysical phenomena, including both oceanic and meteorologic features. These images cover the entire open ocean and are manually selected from Sentinel‐1A WV acquisitions in 2016. For each image, only one prevalent geophysical phenomenon with its prescribed signature and texture is selected for labelling. The SAR images are processed into a quick‐look image provided in the formats of PNG and GeoTIFF as well as the associated labels. They are convenient for both visual inspection and machine learning‐based methods exploitation. The proposed dataset is the first one involving different oceanic or atmospheric phenomena over the open ocean. It seeks to foster the development of strategies or approaches for massive ocean SAR image analysis. A key objective was to allow exploiting the full potential of Sentinel‐1 WV SAR acquisitions, which are about 60,000 images per satellite per month and freely available. Such a dataset may be of value to a wide range of users and communities in deep learning, remote sensing, oceanography and meteorology.