ESA revealed the first stunning images from its groundbreaking Biomass satellite mission – marking a major leap forward in our ability to understand how Earth’s forests are changing and exactly how they contribute to the global carbon cycle.
This image from Biomass depicts tropical forest on islands in Indonesia. This is the Halmahera rainforest, situated in mountainous terrain, much of which has volcanic origins. Several volcanoes remain active in the area, including Mount Gamkonora, visible near the northern coast in this image. The image clearly demonstrates that, beyond providing insights into rainforests, the Biomass P-band radar also reveals topographic features, as its long wavelength can penetrate down to the forest floor.
The image spans approximately 120 km along the Biomass satellite’s flight path (length) and 60 km across in width, with north oriented to the top.
The Biomass synthetic aperture operates continuously in fully polarimetric imaging mode, capturing all four linear polarisation combination: HH, HV, VH, and VV. The resulting images are displayed using a Pauli decomposition in RGB format, where different scattering mechanisms are represented by specific colours: blue corresponds to single-bounce surface scattering, red to double-bounce scattering, and green to multiple-bounce interactions, which are indicative of volume scattering within the forest canopy.
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