Nowadays, several space borne Polarimetric and Multitemporal Synthetic Aperture Radar systems are in operation as TerraSAR-X (X-Band), RADARSAT-2 & RCM (C-Band), Sentinel-1A&B (C-band), ALOS-2 (L-band), SAOCOM (C-band)m, GF3 (C-band), as well as future missions as BIOMASS (P-band).

The availability of spaceborne polarimetric and multidimensional data provides an unprecedented opportunity for applying advanced information processing techniques to the important tasks of environmental monitoring, climate change monitoring and risk management. Polarimetric and multitemporal SAR remote sensing offers an efficient and reliable means of collecting information required to extract quantitative geophysical and biophysical parameters from Earth’s surface. This remote sensing techniques have found many successful applications in crop monitoring and damage assessment, in forestry clear cut mapping, deforestation and burn mapping, in land surface structure (geology) land cover (biomass) and land use, in hydrology (soil moisture, flood delineation), in sea ice monitoring, in oceans and coastal monitoring (oil spill detection) etc.

Polarimetric and Multitemporal SAR represents today a very active area of research in Radar Remote Sensing, and for instance operational applications start to be operational in the frame of the Sentinel-1. Consequently, it becomes important to train and to prepare the future generation of researchers to this very important topic.

Biography

Dr. Carlos Lopez-Martinez
Associate Professor, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Dr. Carlos Lopez-Martinez (S’97-M’04-SM’11) received the MSc. degree in electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 1999 and 2003, respectively.

Dr. Lopez-Martinez is Associate Professor in the area of remote sensing and microwave technology in the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. He has a large professional international experience at DLR (Germany), at the University of Rennes 1 (France), and as a group leader of the Remote Sensing and Natural Resources Modelling team in the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (Luxembourg). His research interests include Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) theory, statistics and applications, multidimensional SAR, radar polarimetry, physical parameter inversion, advanced digital signal processing, estimation theory, and harmonic analysis.

Dr. López-Martínez has authored more than 200 articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings, and received the EUSAR 2002 Conference Student Prize Paper Award, co-authored the paper awarded with the EUSAR 2012 Conference First Place Student Paper Award, and received the IEEE-GRSS 2013 GOLD Early Career Award. Dr. López-Martínez has broad academic teaching experience from bachelor, master, and Ph.D. levels to advanced technical tutorials presented at international conferences and space and research institutions worldwide. He is an associate editor of the IEEE-JSTARS journal and the MDPI Remote Sensing, acting also as invited guest editor for several special issues. He has collaborated in the Spanish PAZ and the ESA’s SAOCOM-CS missions, in the proposal of the Parsifal mission and he is member of the ESA’s Sentinel ROSE-L Mission Advisory Group. He was appointed vice-president of the IEEE-GRSS Spanish chapter, and in 2016 he became its secretary and treasurer. From 2011 Dr. López-Martínez collaborates with the IEEE-GRSS Globalization initiative in Latin America, contributing to the creation of the IEEE-GRSS Chilean chapter and the organization of the 2020 LAGIRSS conference, being appointed as Latin America liaison in 2019. He is also co-chair of the Tutorial Technical Committee of the Indian 2020 InGARSS conference.