Combining remote sensing techniques and field surveys for post-earthquake reconnaissance missions

Remote reconnaissance missions are promising solutions for the assessment of earthquake-induced structural damage and cascading geological hazards. Space-borne remote sensing can complement in-field missions when safety and accessibility concerns limit post-earthquake operations on the ground. However, the implementation of remote sensing...

Detecting plume-driven polynyas from dual-pol SAR imagery

Antarctic ocean temperatures are rising due to climate change, causing land ice to melt at increasingly higher rates. Ice shelf bottom melt is a key factor responsible for Antarctic ice mass loss and as such understanding melt processes in the Antarctic is therefore key to more accurately predict how the global sea level will respond to climate...

Evaluation of SAR and Optical Data for Flood Delineation Using Supervised and Unsupervised Classification

Precise and accurate delineation of flooding areas with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multi-spectral (MS) data is challenging because flooded areas are inherently heterogeneous as emergent vegetation (EV) and turbid water (TW) are common. We addressed these challenges by developing and applying a new stepwise sequence of unsupervised and...

Integrating intensity and context for improved supervised river ice classification from dual-pol Sentinel-1 SAR data

River ice is a major contributor to flood risk in cold regions due to the physical impediment of flow caused by ice jamming. Although a variety of classifiers have been developed to distinguish ice types using HH or VV intensity of SAR data, mostly based on data from RADARSAT-1 and -2, these classifiers still experience problems with breakup...

Polarimetric SAR signals of river ice breakup

Ice jam events can be devastating for the environment, human infrastructure, and local population. During breakup season, it is of great importance to be informed about the river ice cover condition in order to mitigate breakup flood risk. The Athabasca River near FortMcMurray, located in Alberta, is particularly prone to ice jam events and...

Remotely sensed monitoring of small reservoir dynamics: A Bayesian approach

Multipurpose small reservoirs are important for livelihoods in rural semi-arid regions. To manage and plan these reservoirs and to assess their hydrological impact at a river basin scale, it is important to monitor their water storage dynamics. This paper introduces a Bayesian approach for monitoring small reservoirs with radar satellite images....

Remotely sensed small reservoir monitoring: A Bayesian approach

A new semi-supervised `growing' Bayesian classifier for small reservoir delineation has been developed and is tested with Radarsat-2 data for reservoirs in the semi-arid Upper East Region of Ghana. The classifier reduces the confusion error to the land-water boundary pixels, can readily be extended with auxiliary information and has a high...

Use of a SAR in agriculture and forestry

Under contract with ESA (nr. 5777/83/NL/MS) a study on the use of a SAR for agriculture and forestry was performed by the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR together with the Physics Laboratory TNO and the Microwave Laboratory of the Delft University of Technology. In the first part of this study the present state-of-the- art with respect to...