Case Studies: Coastal Zone Monitoring

» The Latest Tool for Coastal Zone Management

A large percentage of the global population lives in coastal regions. Consequently, these areas are under intense pressure from urban growth, industry and tourism. A prerequisite for sustainable management of these environmentally sensitive areas is the availability of accurate and up-to-date information on their extent, state and rate of change.

Earth-observation satellites, such as RADARSAT-1, are excellent tools for collecting information in support of coastal zone management as they can provide synoptic or detailed information of a region on a regular basis. With its higher resolution, multi-polarization and fully polarimetric data, RADARSAT-2 will offer a new look at the coastal zone. Studies on the use of multi-polarized and fully polarimetric C-band radar data for coastal zone mapping are underway. The following reports describe some of the results.