Microwave Remote Sensing of Land. Radio Science Bulletin No 308 (March, 2004)

Considering the rapid growth of population, its impact on the environment, and limited available resources on our planet, the need formonitoring the environmental processes and managing our resources is unequivocal. Microwave remote sensing provides a unique capability towards achieving this goal. Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in microwave remote sensing of land processes through development of advanced airborne and space-borne microwave sensors, and the tools - such as physics-based models and advanced inversion algorithms -needed for analyzing the data. These activities have sharply increased in recent years since the launch of the ERS-1/2, JERS-1, and RADARSAT satellites, and with the availability of radiometric data from SSM/T. A new era has begun with the recent space missions ESA-EN VISAT, NASA-AQUA, and NASDA-ADEOSII, and the upcoming PALSAR and RADARSAT2 missions, which open new horizons for a wide range of operational microwave remote-sensing applications. This paper highlights major activities and important results achieved in this area over the past years.