New Perspectives for Applications and Services Provided by Future Spaceborne sar Missions at the European Space Agency

The Sentinel-1 mission represented an unprecedented source of SAR imagery, on which Copernicus and other providers conveniently leveraged to build a continuously expanding catalogue of operational services. In the next two decades, the family of SAR instruments under the Copernicus umbrella will feature additional wavelength diversity, with the ROSE-L mission providing operational illumination in L-band, and will introduce with the next generation Sentinel-1 (Sentinel-1 NG) a significant step ahead in terms of imaging quality and coverage performance, while carefully guaranteeing data and service continuity with the current generation. The massive volumes of data in space, time, polarizations and frequencies are expected on one hand to significantly enhance the applications and services already in place and on the other to open the way to new mapping and monitoring solutions in land, water and cryosphere domains. This paper will address such new perspectives.