Value added SAR products for ENVISAT

At the end of 1999 the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the environmental satellite ENVISAT. The payload consists of different elements, e.g. ozone sensor, altimeter, spectrometer and an Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). This ASAR is a further development of the well proved SAR system from ERS-1 and ERS-2. The standard processing of the huge amount of data will done in different European Processing and Archiving Centers (PAC). One of these PAC is set up at the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) of the DLR at Oberpfaffenhofen. Additional to the standard products provided by ESA processors, national value added products will be available from the D-PAC. The DFD is setting up a system to support the user community with precise geocoded products. The experience of the geocoding system for ERS, GEOS, will be integrated into the new geocoding system for ENVISAT (EGEO). EGEO will be capable to geocode data from the different modes, like ScanSAR, alternating polarization and different resolution. Various types of geocoded products are under design: enhanced ellipsoid geocoded, terrain geocoded and mosaics. The geocoding system will get support from other DFD facilities. Very important is a topographic data base. This new database will support EGEO with Digital Elevation Models (DEM) from all over the world generated from InSAR, Ground Control Points (GCP) and other auxiliary information. A new processing environment is planned to adapt the system to state of the art hardware, operating system and software. The implementation will use high speed Unix workstations.