Tropical peatland in Southeast Asia has undergone rapid degradation and shows large subsidence due to oxidation and peat shrinkage. The measurement of those deformations is thus valuable for evaluating the peat condition and assessing peat restoration. The time series interferometric synthetic aperture radar (TInSAR), especially with the small baseline subsets (SBAS) method, is capable of measuring long-term deformation. However, the dynamic surface scatterers often change in tropical peatland, which degrades the coherent scatterer (CS) distribution density. This article presents a simple and efficient TInSAR approach that enhances the CS density under such dynamic surface scatter variation based on the SBAS method. In the presented approach, a long-time series of single-look complex images is separated into subsets, and deformation estimation is performed for each subset. The effectiveness of this simple solution was investigated by InSAR simulation and validated using SAR observation data. We applied the subset SBAS approach to the three-year Sentinel-1A C-band SAR dataset acquired over tropical peatland in Indonesia. The analyses showed an improved number of CSs for the introduced subset approach. We further introduce the color representation of CS temporal behavior per subset for visual interpretation of scatterer change.

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles onboard synthetic aperture radar (UAV-SAR) have been developed by many institutions to provide high-resolution, real-time data acquisition and local emergency observation. The SAR system remains the issue to realize the system with the high resolution, lightweight, minimalized payload, power efficiency, high altitude operation, extreme environment, long-duration flight, and full polarimetric mode. For this purpose, our research group plans to develop the X-band circularly polarized UAV SAR for disaster and environmental monitoring using the 25 kg payload of the UAV. The SAR system requires a broadband antenna and full circular polarization for precise observations. The antenna for the SAR systems requires a small size, lightweight, high gain, broadband for chirp pulse, and good antenna isolation and axial ratio (AR). For this purpose, we proposed the 4×4 ax-shaped radiator array antenna. The proposed antenna was simulated, fabricated, and measured in an anechoic chamber. Furthermore, the indoor polarimetric scattering SAR experiment was conducted using canonical targets to investigate the polarimetric SAR capability of the system with the proposed antenna. The result proves the performance of circularly polarized SAR.

In this article, an atmospheric phase screen (APS) compensation algorithm for a near real-time ground-based interferometry synthetic aperture radar (GB-InSAR) over a mountainous area is investigated. A novel APS compensation scheme is proposed to compensate the fluctuated APS caused by a spatial 3-D inhomogeneous refractivity index distribution without any a priori knowledge of moving location. The proposed method simultaneously addresses to identify moving pixels by a criterion of absolute velocity estimated by the coherent pixels technique (CPT). The proposed method consists mainly of three steps: 1) the stratified APS compensation; 2) identification of moving pixel candidate; and 3) the residual APS [remained APS after 1)] compensation by Kriging interpolation. The steps mentioned above are iteratively applied in order to increase the accuracy of the whole process. In this framework, we develop the 2-D quadratic polynomial model of the refractivity index with respect to slant range and topographic height for modeling the stratified APS. Furthermore, a prediction of the residual APS is achieved by applying the intrinsic random function of order k (IRF-k) Kriging interpolation, taking into account the nonstationarity of the residual APS. We evaluate the proposed method using zero-baseline GB-differential InSAR (GB-DInSAR) data over a mountainous area located in Minami-Aso, Kumamoto, Japan, through the near real-time post-landslide measurement campaign.

In multitemporal interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) applications, propagation delay in the troposphere introduces a major source of disturbance known as atmospheric phase screen (APS). This study proposes a novel framework to compensate for the APS from multitemporal ground-based InSAR data. The proposed framework first performs time-series clustering in accordance with the temporal APS behavior realized by the $k$ -means clustering approach. In the second step, joint estimation of the APS and displacement velocity is performed. For this purpose, a novel interferometric signal model, including the APS modeled by the median profiles defined in each cluster, is proposed. The proposed framework is validated with the Ku-band ground-based synthetic aperture radar data sets measured over a mountainous area in Kumamoto, Japan. Tests on these data sets reveal that compared with the conventional approach, the presented approach improves displacement estimation accuracy under severe atmospheric conditions.

This paper presents a new radar sensor configuration of a planar grid antenna array (PGAA) for automotive ultra-wideband (UWB) radar applications. For system realisation, the MIMO concept is adopted. The proposed antenna is designed to operate over the 24 GHz frequency band. It is based on split-ring resonator (SRR) elements to enhance the operating bandwidth and increase the antenna gain, leading to a better-performing radar system. The PGAA consists of thirty-one radiating elements, in which each element excitation is obtained using a common transmission line centre fed by a 50 Ω coaxial probe. By introducing a superstrate dielectric layer at a distance of λ$/2$ from the top of the antenna array, the PGAA gain and impedance bandwidth are further improved. The gain is improved by 2.7 dB to reach 16.5 dBi at 24 GHz, and the impedance bandwidth is enhanced to 9.3 GHz (37.7%). The measured impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna array ranges from 20 GHz to 29.3 GHz for a reflection coefficient ($S_{11}$) of less than −10 dB. The proposed antenna is validated for automotive applications.

Circularly polarized synthetic aperture radar (CP-SAR) is known to be insensitive to polarization mismatch losses caused by the Faraday rotation effect and antenna misalignment. Additionally, the dual-circular polarimetric (DCP) mode has proven to have more polarimetric information than that of the corresponding mode of linear polarization, i.e., the dual-linear polarimetric (DLP) mode. Owing to these benefits, this paper investigates the feasibility of CP-SAR for rice monitoring. A ground-based CP-radar system was exploited, and C-band anechoic chamber data of a self-cultivated Japanese rice paddy were acquired from germination to ripening stages. Temporal variations of polarimetric observables derived from full-circular polarimetric (FCP) and DCP as well as synthetically generated DLP data are analyzed and assessed with regard to their effectiveness in phenology retrieval. Among different observations, the $H$ / $\overline{\alpha }$ plane and triangle plots obtained by three scattering components (surface, double-bounce, and volume scattering) for both the FCP and DCP modes are confirmed to have reasonable capability in discriminating the relevant intervals of rice growth.