Nebula Public Library

Plastic marine litter is a very complex global environmental issue, with plastic litter at the sea surface representing only a small fraction of plastic entering the sea. In this respect, the BLUE project investigated the potential of diverse LIDAR techniques (backscatter, fluorescence, Raman) to address the detection of plastic litter not only floating on the sea surface, but also suspended in the first few metres under the surface, with also a focus on detecting microplastics and discriminating plastic from other types of litter. The approach adopted was four-fold:

The main objectives of the REACT project were to:
▪ Assess how plastic litter can be detected and quantified with current and future remote sensing tools;
▪ Develop adaptive indices insensible to biases induced by sunglint on satellite radiometric products and indicate the constraints of current satellite missions under various atmospheric and illumination conditions;

This activity presents a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) simulator designed to assess the performance of bi-static SAR missions. It is a modular software able to simulate realistic SAR data (including injection of the system non-idealities), to estimate the SAR performance at radiometric and interferometric level. In order to ensure accurate measures of the bi-static performance, it simulates raw data exploiting a time-domain approach, without assumptions on the acquisition geometry. This feature makes the simulator a useful tool for the design of new SAR missions concepts.

Indonesia is periodically affected by severe volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, which are geologically coupled to the convergence of the Australian tectonic plate beneath the Sunda Plate. SAR interferometry (InSAR) is a satellite technology based on radar sensors that can be used to support the study and modelling of terrain movements such as tectonic motions associated with faults, and volcanic processes related to magma movement. The main advantages of InSAR is the synoptic view of wide areas, and the periodic surveying that guarantees long-term monitoring and time series analysis.