Prof. Shaun Quegan from the Cranfield University delivered a report titled “The ESA BIOMASS mission: current status and outstanding problems” at RADI Academic Forum on April 7, 2015.

In his report, Prof. Shaun Quegan firstly introduced the ESA BIOMASS mission, which aims to provide the scientific community with the first accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest biomass, including height and disturbance patterns.

He also described the current status of the mission and the challenges to be addressed: (1) Variation in the environmental conditions under which BIOMASS will operate will vary during the mission, including ionospheric variability, weather (wind and rain) and soil moisture changes; (2) Issues in combining polarimetry, PolInSAR for forest height and tomography to make best estimates of forest biomass; (3) Training and validation of the biomass inversion algorithms; (4) The physics of scattering from forests at P-band; (5) System calibration.

Prof. Shaun Quegan is a member of the ESA BIOMASS Mission Advisory Group. He has great expertise in the physics, systems and data analysis aspects of radar remote sensing, especially SAR, and his current interests lie more in the exploitation of remote sensing technologies in environmental science, particularly terrestrial carbon.