DLR's Experience in Radiometric Calibration of Airborne and Spaceborne SAR Systems.

The goal of the microwave remote sensing activities is to model the relationship between geophysical or biophysical parameters and measured backscattering coefficients. Such quantitative analyses and the development and improvement of models in different fields of application require calibrated data. As the German Aerospace ResearchEstablishment is holding the scientific leadership within the X-SAR project and operates an own airborne SAR system, calibration has beenan important topic in our institute for more than five years. Also calibration experiments with spaceborne systems (ERS-1, JERS-1, SIR-C/X-SAR, PRIRODA) have been proposed and accepted