TropiSAR, a SAR data acquisition campaign in French Guiana

The TropiSAR campaign has been conducted in August 2009 in French Guiana with the ONERA airborne system SETHI. The main objective of this campaign was to collect data to support the Phase A of the Earth Explorer candidate mission, Biomass. Several specific questions need to be addressed to answer the recommendations of the ESAC group and the data collection strategy has been constructed accordingly. The first part of the paper lists these specific questions. We then describe the selected test sites, followed by a summary on the radar instrument and the radar configuration (geometry and waveform). The data acquisition plan is provided and the first results conclude this paper.