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A. Bartsch:
"Capabilities of the European Space Agency's ENVISAT ASAR instrument's Global Mode for monitoring of the hydrosphere";
Talk: IC3 Seminar series, Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change (IC3), University of Waterloo (invited); 2010-10-04.

ENVISAT is a satellite of the European Space Agency which was
launched in 2002. It carries a number of instruments, one of which is
an Advanced SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) instrument. The ASAR
can operate in several modes that differ not only in spatial resolution
but also data quality. Higher resolution data (150m and less) are acquired
on request only and therefore not continuously. This can pose
problems when fast changing surface parameters such as soil moisture,
lakes or flood plains are to be monitored. Whenever there is no
request, data are acquired in the background - so called `Globalī -
mode. It exhibits high noise and has only 1km spatial resolution. For
many regions, however, a high number of images are available. They
have been exploited in the past, especially for the monitoring of surface
hydrology. Related studies are reviewed in this seminar, and also
the follow-up SAR sensor of Sentinel-1 will be discussed.