Prospects for operational use of airborne polarimetric SAR for disaster response and management

Rapid response to natural disasters resulting from events such as earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and tsunamis or anthropogenically induced events such as oil spills often requires response time measured in hours to days. The type of information required spans information on the magnitude and location of damage needed by immediate response teams to longer time scale information to monitor recovery efforts. Airborne radar can play an important role in response to disasters given its day/night and all weather imaging capability coupled with its unique set of measurement observables such as millimeter level surface deformation from radar interferometry and polarimetric scattering data. The properties a radar sensor must possess to have a useful role, e.g., frequency, resolution, swath width, etc., depends on the intended application. In this paper we discuss the potential for radar like the NASA/JPL UAVSAR system to respond to disaster management and provide examples from existing UAVSAR data collection to illustrate its potential.