Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar

This open access book focuses on the practical application of electromagnetic polarimetry principles in Earth remote sensing with an educational purpose. In the last decade, the operations from fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar such as the Japanese ALOS/PalSAR, the Canadian Radarsat-2 and the German TerraSAR-X and their easy data access for scientific use have developed further the research and data applications at L,C and X band. As a consequence, the wider distribution of polarimetric data sets across the remote sensing community boosted activity and development in polarimetric SAR applications, also in view of future missions. Numerous experiments with real data from spaceborne platforms are shown, with the aim of giving an up-to-date and complete treatment of the unique benefits of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data in five different domains: forest, agriculture, cryosphere, urban and oceans

The SAR Handbook: Comprehensive Methodologies for Forest Monitoring and Biomass Estimation

This Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) handbook of applied methods for forest monitoring and biomass estimation has been developed by SERVIR in collaboration with SilvaCarbon to address pressing needs in the development of operational forest monitoring services. Despite the existence of SAR technology with all-weather capability for over 30 years, the applied use of this technology for operational purposes has proven difficult. This handbook seeks to provide understandable, easy-to-assimilate technical material to remote sensing specialists that may not have expertise on SAR but are interested in leveraging SAR technology in the forestry sector

Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar, Principles and Application

Demonstrates the benefits of the usage of fully polarimetric synthetic aperture radar data in applications of Earth remote sensing, with educational and development purposes. Includes numerous up-to-date examples with real data from spaceborne platforms and possibility to use a software to support lecture practicals. Reviews theoretical principles in an intuitive way for each application topic. Covers in depth five application domains (forests, agriculture, cryosphere, urban, and oceans), with reference also to hazard monitorin

Simultaneous Observation Data of GB-SAR/PiSAR to Detect Flooding in an Urban Area

<p>Abstract</p> <p>We analyzed simultaneous observation data with ground-based synthetic aperture radar (GB-SAR) and airborne SAR (PiSAR) over a flood test site at which a simple house was constructed in a field. The PiSAR <inline-formula> <graphic file="1687-6180-2010-560512-i1.gif"/></inline-formula> under flood condition was 0.9 to 3.4&#8201;dB higher than that under nonflood condition. GB-SAR gives high spatial resolution as we could identify a single scattering component and a double bounce component from the house. GB-SAR showed that the <inline-formula> <graphic file="1687-6180-2010-560512-i2.gif"/></inline-formula> difference between the flooding and nonflooding conditions came from the double bounce scattering. We also confirm that the entropy is a sensitive parameter in the eigenvalue decomposition parameters, if the scattering process is dominated by the double bounce scattering. We conclude that <inline-formula> <graphic file="1687-6180-2010-560512-i3.gif"/></inline-formula> and entropy are a good parameter to be used to detect flooding, not only in agricultural and forest regions, but also in urban areas. We also conclude that GB-SAR is a powerful tool to supplement satellite and airborne observation, which has a relatively low spatial resolution.</p

Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd.

This dissertation traces the evolution of premodern historical writing about Yazd, Iran, in order to explore the changing function and utility of local history writing as a key means of engagement in imperial affairs. Yazd had been an important intellectual, religious, and economic center in Persianate empires since Mongol times, and its notable families commanded authority and influence at court. However, by the end of the Safavid era, in the seventeenth century, Yazd had lost this standing. This study understands this decline in terms of parallel transformations that reconfigured the city’s local social networks and elements of its urban morphology. It does so by comparing the different ways in which successive Yazdi authors channeled the history of the imperial realm through stories about Yazd’s own people and places. This study of Yazd’s local histories complicates the court-centered narrative of empire that has dominated scholarship on early modern Islamic empire and outlines a complementary history of the Islamo-Persianate world from its edge. It examines the strategies by which historians writing from the margins commemorated their city’s history as a means of constructing a local sensibility and, at the same time, a sense of orientation in the world outside local places. This project structures this exploration of Yazdi historiography around a series of sites across the city that the authors presented as being constitutive of local networks of actors and, also, of the mythologies that legitimated the authority of sacred kings and their universal empires. Each chapter is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between narrative, space, and memory, and each compares the webs of narratives that Yazdi authors embed in their commemorations of these sites. Toward this end, the project charts the evolution of local strategies for “centering” the city in the larger world by examining changes in the implicit discourse on universal empire, which Yazdi historians situated in their representations of local spaces. In this way, the dissertation maps these transformations in narrative strategy onto changes in the social and topographical features of Yazd and, furthermore, correlates these with shifts in patterns of interaction between the court and the city.PHDNear Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95940/1/mancland_1.pd

Nostratic Dictionary

A revised edition can be found at http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244080.Aharon Dolgopolsky is the leading authority on the Nostratic macrofamily. His 'Nostratic Dictionary' presented here is, of course, something very much more than a dictionary. It is the most thorough and extensive demonstration and documentation so far of what may be termed the Nostratic hypothesis: that several of the world's best- known language families are related in their origin, their grammar and their lexicon, and that they belong together in a larger unit, of earlier origin, the Nostratic macrofamily. It should at once be noted that several elements of this enterprise are controversial. For while the Nostratic hypothesis has many supporters, it has been criticized on rather fundamental grounds by a number of distinguished linguists. The matter was reviewed some years ago in a symposium held at the McDonald Institute, and positions remain very much polarized. It was a result of that meeting that the decision was taken to invite Aharon Dolgopolsky to publish his Dictionary - a much more substantial treatise than any work hitherto undertaken on the subject - at the McDonald Institute. For it became clear that the diversities of view expressed at that symposium were not likely to be resolved by further polemical exchanges. Instead, a substantial body of data was required, whose examination and evaluation could subsequently lead to more mature judgments. Those data are presented here, and that more mature evaluation can now proceed.McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio