Boreal forest, covering about 15% of the Earth’s land surface and being the world's largest terrestrial carbon reservoir, plays an important role in the global cycling of energy, carbon and water.
Currently ESA has undertaken the BioSAR 2008 campaign in northern Sweden in order to find out how best to map boreal forest with space borne radar. By answering this question, the campaign addresses one of the key objectives of the candidate Earth Explorer BIOMASS mission.
BIOMASS is one of the six candidate Earth Explorer missions that has just completed assessment study and will be presented to the science community at a User Consultation Meeting in January 2009. The next stage of development for the BIOMASS mission, if selected, will be the feasibility study which is expected to greatly improve knowledge of how much and where carbon is being stored, and better quantify carbon fluxes between land and the atmosphere. This knowledge will obviously contribute to the better understanding of the global carbon cycle and climate change.
To achieve this goal, the BIOMASS mission will exploit the P-band which is the longest radar wavelength available for Earth Observation and is uniquely sensitive to mapping biomass from space. Afterwards highly accurate and robust methods for transforming the P-band radar signals into forest biomass maps are required. Collecting airborne SAR measurements over Boreal Forest and comparing these to extensive ground measurements, will allow a very accurate mapping of the forest biomass.
Given that complete remote sensing dataset and ground data simultaneously acquired are rare for northern forests, the interest of the campaign, beyond the immediate needs of the BIOMASS mission, is expected to be enormous. Finally, once the process has been completed, the dataset will be made available to the wider scientific community through ESA.
More information on ESA website
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