Microwave remote sensing research at the ElectroScience laboratory

The ElectroScience Laboratory (ESL) at The Ohio State University has made many important contributions to the development of microwave remote sensing, both in theory and practice. The term "remote sensing" is very broad, and could be interpreted to include ESL efforts in areas such as ground penetrating radar technologies, studies of microwave propagation through the atmosphere, contributions to the development of polarimetric concepts for radar, studies of the ionosphere, and experiments and modeling of optical propagation in the atmosphere. More general ESL contributions that play a role in the remote sensing area also include the development of new antennas, radar technologies, and general electromagnetic modeling methods. However, this paper focuses specifically on the "microwave remote sensing" area, where applications involve active or passive microwave sensors used to observe geophysical environments in order to retrieve information about those environments.