Ecosystem Applications Opportunities with NISAR

NASA and ISRO are jointly developing a state of art L and S band space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), planned for launch in 2023. NISAR, through its repeat-pass interferometric orbits, will produce global coverage of SAR data at high repeat cycle, high resolution and larger swath with capability of producing full-polarimetric data in L-band and hybrid polarimetric data in S-band. The NISAR systematic observation at L-band and S-band over Indian region will provide unprecedented time-series data for the Ecosystems applications. NISAR data will address the critical issues of forest carbon stock estimation and monitoring carbon fluxes from vegetation disturbances; changes in the alpine vegetation tree-line; agriculture crop monitoring and changing cropping patterns; spatio-temporal distribution of field-scale soil moisture and inundation dynamics of wetlands. This paper provides overview of applications opportunities in ecosystem sciences with NISAR data and describes the ecosystem science products planned by ISRO for the user community.