ESA BIOMASS: Introduction to Synthetic Aperture Radar

The 2024 BIOMASS Summer School (21–25 October, Jena) focused on biomass and the carbon cycle, with lectures and hands-on sessions on ESA’s BIOMASS mission, SAR remote sensing, and ecosystem monitoring. Hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, it brought together experts and early-career scientists to advance methods for measuring, modeling, and understanding global biomass dynamics.

Kostas Papathanassiou (DLR – Microwaves and Radar Institute) provides a comprehensive and detailed introduction to radar remote sensing. In addition to the physical foundations of radar remote sensing, topics such as the interaction of microwaves with the Earth’s surface, the SAR principle, radar system resolution, the speckle effect, and many other phenomena are explained.