Present and Future ESA SAR Missions and their Advanced Exploitation to Deliver Actionable Information for Society in the Context of Climate Change and Green Transition

For over 30 years, the European Space Agency (ESA) has been at the forefront of satellite SAR Earth Observation. Starting with pioneering interferometric applications of ERS-1 and ENVISAT, our capacity to observe the Earth system in increasingly complex scenarios with ever more precise SAR systems has rocketed. Today, the Sentinel-1 SAR constellation developed by ESA for the EU Copernicus initiative, is an indispensable instrument for science and applications and has demonstrated operational capabilities beyond its initial mission objectives. Its continued systematic observations at C-band not only support long term climate studies, but also provide invaluable data to operational services covering applications from maritime security, to mapping of forests, water and soils as well as supporting humanitarian aid and crisis situations management. Moreover, having fully free and open data provisioned with state-of-the-art AI-powered platform technologies together with analysis and processing tools (like SNAP and PolSARPro), Sentinel-1 is pushing the boundaries of applications. It is why now we understand that changes in ice shelves can occur at scales much shorter than we thought, or that volcanic eruptions can be triggered by heavy rainfall, and it is how we were able to gain insights into the planetary effects of the global covid crisis. But most of all, it is foundational for the next generation of SAR missions that will give us unprecedented insights into our climate system and our societies: BIOMASS — the first satellite to carry a fully polarimetric P-band synthetic aperture radar for interferometric imaging, Harmony — 2 satellites in convoy with a Sentinel-1, carrying a receive-only SAR and a multi-view thermal-infrared instrument advancing science by measuring ocean dynamics, essential for weather prediction and climate models and contributing to the WCRP and SDG goals, and ROSE-L — complementing the capability of Sentinel-1 at L-band, observing vegetation, dry snow and ice. This talk will review the current and upcoming ESA SAR missions and their advanced exploitation to deliver actionable information for society in the context of climate change and green transition.