Analysis of Temporal Land Cover Change using the ESA Rolling Archives

In order to test the potential of the ESA Rolling Archives for the study of temporal land cover change, an area in the Western part of Switzerland has been selected. During the period of 29 September 2007 to 18 May 2008, a total of 21 ENVISAT scenes of the region of interest in Wide Swath mode (WSM) have been downloaded from the ESA ftp server. Though the spatial resolution of data acquired is rather modest (150m), the fact that the temporal resolution (approximately an image every 10 days) is high makes this type of data very valuable. Change detection techniques have been applied to this dataset and interesting results have been obtained for the analysis and monitoring of land cover changes over forestry and agricultural areas.