Conference Agenda

Development and use of low frequency (VHF to UHF) imaging radars has increased in recent years, driven by the presence of flagship scientific programs at European level, such as the BIOMASS mission aiming to map forest height and above ground biomass globally, or by various scientific applications requiring solving FOPEN (Foliage Penetration) issues.

More particularly linked to the BIOMASS mission and to support calibration/validation activities in the tomography phase, a new TropiSAR airborne campaign will be conducted by ONERA on 2027. Objective will be to map and characterize the dense tropical forest cover and the underlying surface using tomoSAR mode at low frequency.

SETHI low-frequency SAR sensors are particularly well-adapted for such a mission where a high performance is required for SAR imaging, repeat-pass interferometric and tomographic measurements.

The proposed campaign will fly again over dense French Guyana tropical forest (Paracou, Nouragues and Rochambeau areas) with P-band, L-band and X-band SAR sensors. Possibility to fly simultaneously multi-band SAR sensors is also of main interest for this campaign: We can then compare multi-band results on same area, with same conditions (weather, vegetation state).

This new campaign will benefit our latest developments in softwares to exploit scientific data using PolinSAR and tomography technics to retrieve information on forest height, density and potentially ground topography.

We will expose in this contribution the campaign plan for TropiSAR-2 experiment, including schedule and tracks selection.