For its third edition, the Remote Sensing Summer School (RSSS) has put in Quebec City (Canada) together ten world-class lectures with 40+ curious students from all continents. This Summer School has been initiated recently each time before the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) supported by the GeoScience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS).
This event organized by INRS-ETE in Quebec City has gathered in two days with many subjects on the table to stimulate research, development and questions by the student community over Remote Sensing.
Presentations were mainly around different types of sensors, such as: optical, Radar, thermal infrared and LIDAR and their own fields of applications and techniques.
Dr. Wooil Moon (University of Manitoba, Canada) exposed some of the most common remote sensing radar. First, space-born radiometer passive sensor looks promising in oceanography and precipitation mapping, such as Aquarius (2011) and SMAS (planned Nov.). Secondly, scatterometer spaced-born, such as the new Chinese HY-2A (2011) and OceanSAT2 (2009), are becoming good satellite to monitor hurricanes / typhoons, global snow mapping and sea surface wind. Finally, in terms of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), PolSAR and Radarsat-2 are leading the way especially in Moon research projects, such as Volcanoes monitoring and observation.
Dr. Wolfgang-Martin Boerner (University of Illinois, USA) introduced an overwhelming presentation embracing SAR technology over optical sensors. From his point of view, SAR is leading the way over optical imagery for all sorts of environmental application for global monitoring, earthquake detection, volcano eruption, tsunami detection or mega cyclone disaster assessment, especially since multi bands and polarization are bringing together new era for remote sensing specialist. He gives many examples of new possibility of research and application today. As an example, the German DLR TanDEM-X (2010) bring new innovative way of twin satellite which will give one of the best seamless global digital elevation models available as a World DEM product with accuracy: 2m (relative) / 4m (absolute) vertical accuracy in a 12m x 12m raster.
Dr. Jean-Pierre Dedieu (University of Grenoble, France) talks compared optical and Radar/SAR capability for snow monitoring. His projects with Électricité de France (Hydro power corporation in France) were mainly use in operation optical imagery (e.g. MODIS, MERIS, VGT) with daily temporal resolutions for snow extent binary maps and snow cover fraction maps. He highlighted nice EO data center, open cooperation intiatives, such as EODC-water project in Austria for October. Even if his project for snow mapping using SAR data were more at R & D stage compared to optical, he presents nice open source tools develop by ESA, such as PolSAR Pro for exploiting SAR datasets (RADARSAT, TerraSAR-X, Envisat) and Next SAR Toolbox (NEST) to process and analyzing SAR datasets (ex. RADARSAT, COSMOS-Skymed, JERS-1, SENTINEL).
The next edition of RSSS and IGARSS in will be held in Milan, Italy.