Global Environmental Alert Service (GEAS)

Early warning systems represent an innovative and effective approach to mitigate the risk associated with natural hazards. Early warning technologies are now available for almost all natural hazards and systems are already in operation in all parts of the world. Nevertheless, recent disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and Katrina hurricane in 2005, highlighted inadequacies in early warning technologies.

Efforts towards the development of a global warning system are necessary for turning the tide in early warning processes and technologies. There is a pressing need for a globally comprehensive early warning system based on existing systems. The global system should be a mechanism which can consolidate scientific information and evidences, package this knowledge in a form usable to international and national decision makers and actively disseminate this information to those users.

The proposed Global Environmental Alert Service (GEAS) will provide information emanating from monitoring, Earth observing and early warning systems to users in a near-real-time mode and bridge the gap between the scientific community and policy makers. Characteristics and operational aspects of such a service, GEAS, are discussed.     

Design of an end-to-end demonstration mission of a Formation-Flying Synthetic Aperture Radar (FF-SAR) based on microsatellites

The paper focuses on space system design aspects related to an end-to-end demonstration mission, aiming at showing the feasibility of a Formation Flying Synthetic Aperture Radar (FF-SAR) with microsatellite class platforms (~100 kg). Trajectory design approaches that can fulfil payload requirements are addressed to enable selected FF-SAR applications. The exploitation of these applications relies on suitable combinations of FF-SAR techniques like Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) enhancement, High-Resolution Wide Swath (HRWS) SAR imaging, and Coherence Resolution Enhancement (CRE). In this framework, a cluster of 3 micro-satellites, working in X-band, flying in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) close-formation, has been designed as a candidate end-to-end system demonstration mission. One satellite embarks a Transmitting-Receiving (Tx/Rx) radar, i.e. it is a monostatic SAR. The other two satellites are Receiving-only platforms. Critical design aspects related to spacecraft subsystems and formation-flying analysis are addressed to confirm the technical feasibility of the spaceborne distributed system implementing the FF-SAR principle.     

Clutter Residues of a Coherent MTI Radar Receiver

In moving target indicator radar receivers a saturation is always present in the IF stages in order to compress the dynamic range of large clutter inputs. This nonlinearity greatly affects the performances of the cancelling circuits, because of the spreading of the spectra. A quantitative analysis of this effect has been conducted, with an analytical expression chosen for the limitation characteristic. A high degradation of both single-and double-canceller improvement factors has been obtained. Losses of 20 dB for the double canceller are not uncommon. Clutter residue levels at the receiver output have also been computed in order to see how the performance compares with ideal constant false alarm rate behavior.     

Polarization Effect on Multipath for Extended Targets

The results of a theoretical investigation of the influence of polarization on multipath are presented. First, the case of a point target is examined and it is confirmed that the multipath effect tends to vanish for rough sea and small grazing angles. Models of a buoy and of a large ship are then introduced and it is shown that, for targets that are extended in height, the multipath effect for vertical and horizontal polarization is substantially the same.