The IREA-CNR Airborne SAR Infrastructure: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

This work describes the airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) infrastructure developed at the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) - National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Naples, Italy.The current infrastructure consists of a flight and a ground segment, including: a multi-frequency airborne SAR sensor operating at X- and L-band, owned by IREA-CNR; an IT platform for data storage and processing, located at the laboratories of IREA-CNR; an airborne SAR data processing chain, completely developed at IREA-CNR and University Parthenope, Naples, Italy.To show the current capabilities of this infrastructure in terms of characteristics of the final products as well as of quick response in emergency cases, a real world application scenario, namely, the monitoring of the volcanic area of Stromboli, Italy, in the frame of an agreement between IREA-CNR and the Department of Civil Protection of the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers, is presented.The short-term future perspectives related to the exploitation of this airborne SAR infrastructure are finally drawn, according to ongoing strengthening actions supported by already assigned fundings.