National Disaster Monitoring Using SAR Technology

Guo Huadong

Institute of Remote Sensing Applications,

Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Email: guohd@irsa.ac.cn, hdguo@cashq.ac.cn

Space and Earth observing technologies play an important role in monitoring and mitigation of natural disasters. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), as an active microwave remote sensing technique, plays a particularly important role because it is capable of all time and all weather imaging, penetrating cloud and haze, and imaging with rapid developed interferometry.

In the past decades, airborne SAR systems of different bands have been developed successfully. Now the remote sensing satellite ground station is capable of receiving, processing, archiving, and distributing types of SAR data, including RADARSAT-2, ERS-1/2, ENVISAT. Meanwhile, the environment and disaster monitoring and forecast satellites are under development, the S-band SAR onboard will focus on natural disaster monitoring.

It has been successfully conducted to monitoring natural disasters using both airborne and spaceborne SAR technique. As to the flood disaster in midstream and downstream of Yangtze River, we can, with the support of the regional resource and environment database, monitor it using SAR and provide the government with information about disaster situation in 48 hours, which is supportive of decision making in flood mitigation. InSAR technique can be applied to subsidence and earthquake monitoring and can retrieve the extent of depression or uprising, which shows the capabilities and potentials of radar remote sensing technique in earthquake mitigation.