Hydrological monitoring of wetland areas using SAR techniques (Hydro-SAR)

The Alos PalSAR, ERS-1/2, Envisat ASAR and especially the future Sentinel SAR missions can have an important contribution to the field of Hydrology by providing continuous information about change detection in wetland areas of significant ecological importance by determining the main characteristics of water dynamics.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) amplitude and phase observations offer new opportunities to obtain measurements and modelling of hydrological characteristics such as:

• water surface extent,
• water level changes,
• water flow directions.

These characteristics are useful to asses local hydrological conditions for a better management in terms of disaster risk mitigation (floods), environmental (pollution and contaminants filtration capacity of wetlands) and ecological (habitat suitability for the local flora and fauna) activities, and for improved hydrological models.

For these reasons, we create HydroSAR, in support of the ESA efforts to wetlands monitoring using EO technologies.