Along-track interferometry using TanDEM-X: First results from marine and land applications

Space borne SAR along-track interferometry (ATI) has various innovative marine and land applications like traffic measurement, ship detection and surface current mapping. In comparison to single-satellite ATI with TerraSAR-X or RADARSAT-2, the interferometric imaging modes of the TanDEM-X (TerraSAR-X add-on for Digital Elevation Measurements) satellite formation offer improved capabilities, e.g. longer and multiple ATI baselines. This enables to achieve higher sensitivities to measure ground motions and to resolve ambiguities. The extraction of motion information from TanDEM-X data by means of ATI is also challenging due to the mixture of across-track (XTI) and ATI baseline components. In this paper we show first results of TanDEM-X ATI.