Title: From LEO to GEO: Options for SAR Remote Sensing with Short Revisit

Speaker: Prof. Andrea Monti-Guarnieri

Time: 19: 30-22: 00, December 4, 2023

Place: Meeting Room 1 

Abstract:  The achievement of a short – ideally sub-daily revisit is one of the major goal of the future, as this would exploit at its best the day-and-night, full weather capabilities of SAR remote sensing. Constellations of small SAR sensors, mainly based on X-band SAR, in LEO orbit, are already available, and their number is progressively increasing increasing with time. It is expected that this would meet the demand for very high resolution product with fast refresh. However, such constellation would not be suited for imaging at medium to coarse resolution with sub-daily revisit over huge areas, that is needed for monitoring smooth fields, fastly evolving with time, like water-vapor, soil moisture, ground motion or flooding. Backcsatter maps and interferometric SAR products could play a relevant role in monitoring, and forecasting hazards connected with the water cycles and made much more intense by the temperature increase and climate changing.

In the proposed speech, we will shortly overview two different concepts aimed at short revisit, but serving very different applications, with very different performance, but providing a marked cost-effective approach. The first is an along-track formation of CubeSATs SAR, where multiple sensors, at least three, combines together to achieve a single high resolution image with reasonable large swath. The second is a SAR placed in a geostationary orbit, capable of imaging huge swath with very short revisit, even hourly. In both cases, we discuss the concepts, the intended applications, the strength and the weakdness, comparing them with competitive systems.

Biography: Andrea Virgilio Monti-Guarnieri, M.Sc. cum laude (1988) in electronic engineering, IEEE-member, full professor within “Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria”. He is co-founder of POLIMI inter-departmental laboratory GEO-LAB. He has been chairing courses on digital and statistical signal processing, telecommunications, and RADAR.He coauthored over 250 scientific publications, of which 83 international peer-reviewed publications. H index (Google): 37, citations 7200, 4 conference awards, and applications for five patents.  He has been in scientific-technical committees of international workshops and symposia on Radar and Earth Observation: Fringe workshop, Living Planet Symposium, PolinSAR, EUSAR, IEEE-IGARSS, IEEE-Radar conference, CEOS-SAR. He is co-founder of Polimi spin-off Aresys (2003), targeting SAR, Radar, and geophysics applications. In 2014-2018 he had been one member of the “Technical-scientific Committee “of the Italian Space Agency (ASI), nominated by the president. In 2015-2018 he had been an Italian alternate delegate member of GEO (Group on Earth Observations). His experience is focused on proposing applications, designing innovative SAR systems and solutions, particularly in spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar. He cooperates with ESA with activities and contracts: he has participated in the commissioning phases of ERS, ENVISAT, Sentinel1A and B, he has been a member of the Quality Working Group. He is currently member of ESA working group ESSEO, European Scientists on Spectrum for Earth Observation.He had been member of ESA Mission Advisory Group for the Hydroterra, candidate EE-10, and he is currently president of ASI MAG for the geostationary SAR mission.His current interests focus on Radar-based concepts, MIMO LEO SAR formations, Ground-Based Radar, satellite Radar for environmental monitoring, security and civil applications, and SAR for automotive.