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2. BPS and Above Ground Biomass Products Overview#

BIOMASS is a fully polarimetric SAR mission with its radar instrument relying on a single imaging mode, being Stripmap (SM), declined into 3 different swaths (S1, S2, S3) to achieve the global coverage.

The Above Ground Biomass product family is composed by:

  • Level-2a (L2a): product composed by stack-based images obtained from L1c processing and auxiliary data: the ground cancelled calibrated backscatter for all polarizations (HH/VH/VV). The retrieved parameters have a different resolution and projection (latitude-longitude) with respect to the L1c source data. Same algorithms are envisaged to generate the product in INT and TOM phases;

  • Level-2b (L2b): product composed by dry weight of above ground biomass and its quality layer. All on map and tile based, derived from all L2a in a given Global cycle on the tile;

The Above Ground Biomass product family is generated during routine phase by the BIOMASS Processors (i.e., L2a Processor for L2a products, L2b Processor for L2b products) running in the operational processing environment. The L2b AGB processing has optional internal dependency on FD/FH L2b. L2 products are internal products generated only for the BIOMASS scientific team.

The L2b BIOMASS products are geocoded to a specific tile based geographic DGG [RD9], while the L2a products are geocoded in a latitude longitude projection with the same origin and sampling of the DGG, but with an extension of the current L2a product ground coverage.

Note

Regarding AGB, the nomenclature AGB L2a indicates the processing unit and flow, whereas the product for AGB flow at L2a is the ground cancelled product (GN).

Note

Provided that FD algorithm proper validation will only be possible with BIOMASS in orbit, the strategy proposed to deal with FH/AGB dependency on FD is to initially input to FH/AGB a Forest/Non-Forest mask generated outside of BPS [AD6] [AD7] [AD8] [AD9]. After testing FD performance with BIOMASS in orbit, FD dependency can be switched on again, provided it has a satisfactory performance.