IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2015 - 3

from the editor
by Lorenzo bruzzone

Dear Reader,

elcome to the March issue of the third year of
publication of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote
Sensing Magazine. This year I expect the magazine
to increase in maturity and, after its initial phase, to
become familiar to all GRSS members. This expectation
stems from the fact that both IEEE Xplore and QMAGS
versions of the magazine will continue to be distributed
to all GRSS members free of charge during 2015. This is
one more good reason to be a GRSS member!
In 2015 we will move to a new phase of publication of the magazine in which special issues (which
will start to be published in the second half of the year)
will alternate with regular issues. This mix is intended
to integrate issues addressing a specific topic of broad
interest in a coherent way (by presenting a collection
of thematic papers) with more general issues including tutorial papers and regular contributed papers with
a broader range of topics. Moreover, we will continue
publishing all of the successful columns started during
the initial year, 2013, and those introduced in 2014 (e.g.,
the interesting and informative Space Agency column).
This issue includes two articles in the Features section.
The first article describes the Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP) radar instrument, an L-band scatterometer/
synthetic aperture radar (SAR) with capabilities uniquely
designed for global retrieval of surface soil moisture.
SMAP has been successfully launched on January 31,
2015. The article describes the radar architecture designed
on the basis of the science requirements, mitigation of terrestrial radio frequency interference (RFI), calibration stability, and silencing radiated emissions from the electronics in the presence of SMAP's sensitive radiometer. The
second article addresses the role that remote sensing can
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2015.2401671
Date of publication: 25 March 2015

MARCH 2015

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

play in mitigating risks from natural hazards and therefore limiting their disruption of human activity. The paper
focuses on monitoring the vulnerability term of the risk
equation, and in particular the physical vulnerability factor using remote sensing imagery. It provides an overview
of state-of-the-art methodologies used to extract a set of
selected physical vulnerability indicators.
The Space Agency column presents an article that
describes in detail Earth observation activities by the
Korea Space Research Institute (KARI), which coordinates space activities in South Korea.
The Technical Committees column describes the
2015 Data Fusion Contest organized by the Image
Analysis and Data Fusion Technical Committee (IADF
TC) of the IEEE GRSS. This contest focuses on challenging image analysis tasks related to multi-resolution and
multi-sensor fusion of very high resolution images.
The Chapters column presents two articles. The former describes the activities of the IEEE Singapore AESS/
GRSS Joint Chapter. The latter presents the activities
and future plans of the IEEE GRSS South Italy chapter.
The Book Review column presents an overview of
two remote sensing books. The first book is Microwave
Radar and Radiometric Remote Sensing, written Fawwaz
T. Ulaby and David G. Long and published by the University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2014. The review of
this book was written by Prof. John Richards of the Australian National University, Australia. The second book
is Satellite InSAR Data-Reservoir Monitoring from
Space, written by Alessandro Ferretti and published by
EAGE Publications bv. The review was written by Prof.
Richard Bamler of the German Aerospace Center (DLR)
and the Technische Universität München (TUM).
The Education column presents a report on the
GRSS Summer School organized in South Africa on
October 25-26, 2014 at the University of Johannesburg.
3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2015