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Conference Agenda

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Daily Overview

Session

Biomass First Results I
Location: Purple Hall
Session Chair: Michael Fehringer, European Space Agency (ESA)
Session Chair: Björn Rommen, European Space Agency-ESA

Presentation 2

11:30am - 11:50am

Validating Global TEC Map by exploring BIOMASS polarimetric measurements

Jun Su Kim, Felipe Betancourt-Payan, Konstantinos Papathanassiou

German Aerospace Center, Germany

The European Space Agency’s BIOMASS is the first spaceborne SAR sensor operating at P-band since April 2025. Due to the high sensitivity of P-band microwaves to Earth's ionosphere and its spatio-temporal changes, BIOMASS data where expected to reveal prominent ionospheric features more than any previous spaceborne SAR sensors. The total electron content (TEC), its spatial variation, and its vertical profile is characterized by exploring Faraday rotation (FR), azimuth spatial shifts and azimuths sub-band shift estimates from BIOMASS data.

The global ionospheric map (GIM) is generated from the ionospheric delay measurements acquired by selected ground stations from the GNSS satellite signals. It is provided in form of global maps of every second hour with 2.5° latitude and 5° longitude grid. Despite its low resolution, its global coverage and long time series reaching almost 30 years of archive make it one of the fundamental data for the ionospheric analysis.

In this study the TEC levels from GIM are validated using the Earth’s geomagnetic field and the FR measurements of BIOMASS. First the effect of the lower orbit of the sun-synchronous SAR compared to the whole-integrated TEC value from GIM are evaluated in terms of local time of day and seasons (for now summer and autumn only). The spectral analysis demonstrates the power of the ionospheric spatial variations finer than the resolution of GIM.

Despite the fact that BIOMASS data are limited in local time (6:00 and 18:00), this study provides a first global validation of TEC against non-GNSS measurement.