SAR based products for the implementation of humanitarian aid and development assistance projects within the UNOSAT project

The UNOSAT service is an ESA Earth Observation Market Development initiative whose objective is to encourage, facilitate, accelerate and expand the use of accurate geo-information derived from EO satellite imagery by professionals involved in the implementation of humanitarian aid and development assistance projects. In this paper, we focus on the role of SAR within this context. Space-borne SAR has a particularly good potential to support disaster management and humanitarian relief projects thanks to its all-weather capability, its capabilities for change detection, the large existing data archives, and, of course, the geometric and thematic information content of the images. Basic processing techniques, including precision image co-registration, multi-temporal analysis, terrain corrected geocoding, interferometry, and radargrammetry are well developed and operational. Advanced techniques like differential interferometry and interferometric point target analysis (IPTA) became more and more operational during the last years and provide unique information about terrain stability and deformation