Recent Advancement of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Systems and Their Applications to Crop Growth Monitoring

Synthetic aperture radars (SARs) propagate and measure the scattering of energy at microwave frequencies. These wavelengths are sensitive to the dielectric properties and structural characteristics of targets, and less affected by weather conditions than sensors that operate in optical wavelengths. Given these advantages, SARs are appealing for use in operational crop growth monitoring. Engineering advancements in SAR technologies, new processing algorithms, and the availability of open-access SAR data, have led to the recent acceleration in the uptake of this technology to map and monitor Earth systems. The exploitation of SAR is now demonstrated in a wide range of operational land applications, including the mapping and monitoring of agricultural ecosystems. This chapter provides an overview of—(1) recent advancements in SAR systems; (2) a summary of SAR information sources, followed by the applications in crop monitoring including crop classification, crop parameter estimation, and change detection; and (3) summary and perspectives for future application development.