1. SAR-related ARD activities
Canadian Space Agency
SAR-related ARD activities
Paul Briand,
LSI VC 3 meeting
March 20-21, 2017

2. Context
The CSA, in partnership with different Departments, is starting five new initiatives to ensure an increasing use of space-based EO data in key policy areas of terrestrial monitoring activities supporting climate change impacts and ecosystem resilience.
Multi-sources EO data
Interoperability and complementarity
Development of EO derived products
Land cover and land cover change
Essential ecosystem variables
Development of geospatial big data processing/analytics tools
Data cube analytic environment
Optical and SAR ARD
Toolboxes enabling full exploitation of EO data
Generate derived products and information in support of evidence-based decision making for ecosystems monitoring and climate change

3. SAR - ARD NRCan-CCMEO initiative: Objectives:
Development of a big geospatial data analytics (BGDA)systems, referred as the Geoanalytics Earth Observation Data Environment (GEODE).
Objectives:
Conduct scientific planning and outreach to develop a shared cross-sectoral vision to identify BGDA needs & requirements and which develops opportunity for collaborative R&D partnerships in the academic and commercial sectors to address these needs & requirements
Establish the requirements of ARD from the Radarsat Constellation Mission and from optical sensors
Improve capacity to characterize Canada’s landmass through multi-sensor fusion
Develop capacity to Develop a toolbox to generate on-demand value-added products depicting vegetation change characteristics across Canada
Specific workpackage on developing and assessing SAR and RCM based ARD for time series analytics

4. SAR – ARD Workplan Phase 1
Development of a specification for RADARSAT-based ARD considering the GEODE environment and interoperability with other EO datasets.
This will include examining current SAR ARD standards/definitions under development (e.g. CEOS) and operational (e.g. Google Earth Engine) and the development of mini-cubes to support development, testing and demonstration.
First activity: Users needs and requirements for SAR ARD
Big Geopatial Data Analytics Workshop, Ottawa, January 30, 2017
Moving Towards Analysis Ready SAR Data

5. SAR ARD Workshop Outcomes
The characterization of initial radar-‐related ARD requirements and analytics represented a challenging task.
Different SAR User groups and applications have different SAR Data and product needs.
Radiometry
Preference is more for a Beta-0 or Sigma-0 projection with an incident angle layer as additional channel to the product. Most numerical models require Sigma-0 and incident angle information as input. Local slope correction should not be imposed in ARD, since DEM layer quality in the cube can/will evolve over time (TerraSAR-X and Lidar DEM). Local slope correction is low processing cost, so it can be easily done on the fly during the cube analysis.
Incident angle file
An incident angle channel would be added to the product date in order to enable numerical modeling.

6. SAR ARD Phase 1: Workshop Outcomes
Keep and enable use of the phase information of the radar signals (InSAR applications).
Polarization:
Preservation of the polarimetric phase through the processing chain to ARD (i.e speckle filtering, orthorectification).
Compression
No real discussion on data compression yet ( bits). For 32 bits, it might be a real issue depending on the cube infrastructure and available resources.

7. SAR – ARD Workplan Next steps
Phase 2:
Development of an ARD production roadmap to support the ingest and staging of these data in the GEODE. This will include determining scope of information requirements required to support time series analysis – (e.g. amplitude only or amplitude+phase)
Phase 3:
Research and development of analytical tools capable of utilizing radar-based time series and where advantageous, integrating with other data available in the GEODE.