The IREA-CNR Airborne SAR Infrastructure: State of the Art and Future Perspectives

This work describes the airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) infrastructure developed at the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) - National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Naples, Italy. The current infrastructure consists of a flight and a ground segment, including: a multi-frequency airborne SAR sensor operating at X- and L-band, owned by IREA-CNR; an IT platform for data storage and processing, located at the laboratories of IREA-CNR; an airborne SAR data processing chain, completely developed at IREA-CNR and University Parthenope, Naples, Italy. To show the current capabilities of this infrastructure in terms of characteristics of the final products as well as of quick response in emergency cases, a real world application scenario, namely, the monitoring of the volcanic area of Stromboli, Italy, in the frame of an agreement between IREACNR and the Department of Civil Protection of the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers, is presented. The short-term future perspectives related to the exploitation of this airborne SAR infrastructure are finally drawn, according to ongoing strengthening actions supported by already assigned fundings