PE&RS March 2007

Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) involves the use of two or more SAR images of the same area to extract landscape topography and its subtle deformation patterns as well as land cover characteristics. InSAR provides a great tool for natural hazard monitoring and natural resource management such as imaging earthquake displacement, mapping ground surface deformation at volcanoes, documenting land surface deformation associated with fluid withdrawal, recording movement of glaciers, mapping water-level changes over wetlands, constructing digital elevation models, characterizing land covers and their changes, etc. The cover figure illustrates one of diverse applications of InSAR technique– imaging water-level changes over wetlands. An InSAR image from the C-band (wavelength of 5.7 cm) Canadian Radarsat-1 satellite captured the dynamic changes in waterlevel over a portion of the swamp forest near southeastern Louisiana between May 22 and June 15, 2003. Each fringe (full color cycle) represents a 3.1-cm change in water-level. The total water-level change was more than 30 cm over the imaged water basin. A future InSAR system with short revisit times will allow characterizing the temporal evolution of water-level changes in an unprecedented spatial resolution, which will improve hydrological modeling predictions and enhance the assessment of future flood events over wetlands. Image courtesy of USGS.

Highlight Articles

217 Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR): Its Past, Present and Future (Adobe PDF 853Kb)
Zhong Lu, Ohig Kwoun and Russell Rykhus

223 WyomingView: Promoting Remote Sensing Research and Applications with No-cost Satellite Data (Adobe PDF 1.28Mb)
Ramesh Sivanpillai and Kenneth L. Dreise

Columns & Updates
229 Grids and Datums— Sultanate of Oman (Adobe PDF 113Kb)
231 Book Review — GIS Tutorial: Workbook for ArcView 9 (Adobe PDF 290Kb)
233 Book Review — Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS (Adobe PDF 168Kb)
234 Industry News
237 Headquarters News (Adobe PDF 69Kb)

Announcements
237 New Sustaining Member —
Geographic Resource Solutions (Adobe PDF 69Kb)

Departments
230 New Member List
232 Region of the Month
235 Certification List
238 Who’s Who in ASPRS
239 Sustaining Member List
241 Instructions to Authors
258 Forthcoming Articles
310 Calendar
328 ASPRS Member Champions (Adobe PDF 129Kb)
329 Classifieds
330 Professional Directory
331 Advertiser Index
332 Membership Application

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

245 InSAR Imaging of Volcanic Deformation over Cloud-prone Areas - Aleutian Islands
Zhong Lu

Mapping ground surface deformation of volcanoes over the Aleutian Islands using satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR).

259 Mine Subsidence Monitoring Using Multi-source Satellite SAR Images
Linlin Ge, Hsing-Chung Chang, and Chris Rizos

ERS-1/2, JERS-1, Radarsat-1, and Envisat satellite imagery were analysed using differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar to monitor mine subsidence in Australia with sub-centimeter accuracy when compared against ground survey profiles.

267 Study of Rain Events over the South China Sea by Synergistic Use of Multi-sensor Satellite and Groundbased Meteorological Data
Werner Alpers, Cho Ming Cheng, Yun Shao, and Limin Yang

A study of fine-scale structures of convective rain events based on data from multiple satellites, weather radar, and synoptic meteorological data.

279 Quantitative Evaluation of Polarimetric Classification for Agricultural Crop Mapping
Erxue Chen, Zengyuan Li, Yong Pang, and Xin Tian

Agricultural crop classification capability of single band full polarization SAR data was quantitatively evaluated with AIRSAR L-band polarimetric SAR data using different classification methods.

285 Efficient Water Area Classification Using Radarsat-1 SAR Imagery in a High Relief Mountainous Environment
Yeong-Sun Song, Hong-Gyoo Sohn, and Choung-Hwan Park

Several methods to identify the water area during a flash flood are compared, and an efficient and economical method for water area classification in high relief mountainous area is described.

297 Comparisons of Compositing Period Length for Vegetation Index Data from Polar-orbiting and Geostationary Satellites for the Cloud-prone Region of West Africa
Rasmus Fensholt, Assaf Anyamba, Simon Stisen, Inge Sandholt, Ed Pak, and Jennifer Small

Assessment of the potential improvement within the domain of temporal resolution using geostationary MSG data for vegetation monitoring as compared to Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite data.

311 Remote Sensing Change Detection Based on Canonical Correlation Analysis and Contextual Bayes Decision
Lu Zhang, Mingsheng Liao, Limin Yang, and Hui Lin

A multi-step statistical analysis approach combining Canonical Correlation Analysis and Contextual Bayes Decision for change detection using bi-temporal multispectral remotely sensed images.

319 LUCC Impact on Sediment Loads in Sub-tropical Rainy Areas
Xiaoling Chen, Shuming Bao, Hui Li, Xiaobin Cai, Peng Guo, Zhongyi Wu, Weijuan Fu, and Hongmei Zhao

Integration of RS/GIS with statistical analysis was employed to study the land-use/cover-changes (LUCC) and sediment loads and their driving forces in an intensively farmed watershed characterized by a mountainous and hilly topography and rainy climate.