BIG NEWS Airbus and Hisdesat Servicios have generated the first joint TerraSAR-X / PAZ Radar Interferogram. This milestone demonstrates the missions’ capacity for cross-sensor interferometry, whose processing is among the most challenging.
As PAZ is positioned in the same orbit as TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X and features exactly identical ground swaths and acquisition modes, they all three form a high-resolution SAR satellite constellation, jointly exploited by Hisdesat and Airbus. With the launch of PAZ, the observation repeat cycle has been divided by half, which improves the monitoring of fast ground deformation phenomena that can endanger lives and infrastructures.
Interferograms are typically used to derive the topographic elevation and deformation of the Earth’s surface and are created using at least two different images acquired at a different date. This flattened Cross-Sensor-Interferogram has been created from a mixed image pair with 4 days temporal separation acquired by TerraSAR-X and PAZ (StripMap scenes from 22 and 26 November 2018). The area covers the oil and gas production site Burgan (Kuwait) and parts of the Persian Gulf. The oil field is the world largest sandstone oil field with a total surface area of about 1,000 km².