PHARUS as a Research Platform for Tropical Forest Radar Monitoring

Synthetic Aperture Rada¡ can be an important tool for operational forest mapping and monitoring in the tropics. In the development toward large scale operational use of SAR, however, a number of issues must still be resolved, pertaining to the performance and economics of SAR sensors in tropical forest management applications. The fully polarimetric, C-band, phased array airborne SAR "PHARUS" is a presently available resea¡ch platform that can be used to address a number of these issues, concerning the use of airborne as well as spaceborne SAR