GeoSAR will be gracing the cover of PE&RS this month which will be distributed at the ESRI International User Conference July 12th- 16th in San Diego, CA. Be sure to pick up your copy, view the cover, and read the feature article “Topographic Mapping Using IFSAR Data in a 3D Desktop GIS Environment” written by: L.G. (Jake) Jenkins and Larry Lund.

The cover image represents a Digital Elevation Model generated from GeoSAR’s P-band radar overlaid with X and P-band orthorectified images, all in the ChromaDepth® color scheme. The orthorectified images were filtered to increase homogeneity, reduce speckling and remove artifacts. Waterways were flattened and rendered monotonic. The final images were composed into the scene using ESRI®’s ArcGIS software using a custom color pallet that allows the cooler colors to recede and warmer colors to advance on the eye when viewed using the ChromaDepth® 3-D glasses.

GeoSAR’s X and P-band orthorectified images are arranged split screen to highlight features such as terrain, agricultural fields and mangroves. P-band is located in the upper left as the X-band is located in the lower right. P-band highlights features associated with human settlements such as agricultural fields, irrigation channels, roadways and buildings, even those that may be hidden below the vegetation, whereas the mangroves appear brighter in the X-band imagery because they scatter more of the radar energy back.

GeoSAR is the world’s only dual-band, single-pass airborne interferometric SAR system. Penetrating clouds and foliage, GeoSAR simultaneously maps surface features (using x-band) and near bare-earth elevation (using P-band), making it particularly well suited for equatorial mapping.