Ricerc@Sapienza

The design of a K-band radial leaky-wave antenna is presented for polarization diversity applications. The antenna structure is constituted by an annular, radially periodic, and metallic strip grating printed on top of a single-layer grounded dielectric slab. The integrated feeding system is defined by a 2 × 2 array of planar slot sources for cylindrical surface-wave excitation.

We present and discuss an electromagnetic model for the description of the coherent scattering from bare soils illuminated by a radar system under arbitrary bistatic geometries. The scattering problem is solved under the Kirchhoff approximation (KA) accounting for both the sphericity of the wavefront of the incident wave and the radiation pattern of the transmitting and receiving antennas. We propose here a general formulation and solution of the scattering problem applicable to an arbitrary bistatic geometry.

Algal blooms of the water are an important variable for the analysis of freshwater ecosystems, which are relevant not only for human populations but also for plant and animal diversity. Monitoring algal blooms from space allows for a continuous and automatic control without the necessity of water sampling and human intervention. However, it is a very challenging task, which becomes particularly difficult when dealing with cyanobacteria blooms.

Millimetre-wave radiometers will be on board of the future operational Eumetsat Polar System Second Generation (EPS-SG) satellites with the primary objective to support weather and climate models. These radiometers, and in particular the Ice Cloud Imager (ICI), will provide channels from 183 up to 664 GHz at a spatial sampling of 16 km, greatly enhancing ice cloud retrieval capability at global scale to validate and improve microphysics parameterization.

1. Biodiversity includes multiscalar and multitemporal structures and processes, with different levels of functional organization, from genetic to ecosystemic levels. One of the mostly used methods to infer biodiversity is based on taxonomic approaches and community ecology theories. However, gathering extensive data in the field is difficult due to logistic problems, especially when aiming at modelling biodiversity changes in space and time, which assumes statistically sound sampling schemes. In this context, airborne or satellite remote sensing allows information to be gathered

Assessing biodiversity from field-based data is difficult for a number of practical reasons: (i) establishing the total
number of sampling units to be investigated and the sampling design (e.g. systematic, random, stratified) can be
difficult; (ii) the choice of the sampling design can affect the results; and (iii) defining the focal population of
interest can be challenging. Satellite remote sensing is one of the most cost-effective and comprehensive approaches

Understanding biodiversity changes in time is crucial to promptly provide management practices against diversity loss. This is overall true when considering global scales, since human-induced global change is expected to make significant changes on the Earth's biota. Biodiversity management and planning is mainly based on field observations related to community diversity, considering different taxa. However, such methods are time and cost demanding and do not allow in most cases to get temporal replicates.

Forests cover about 30% of the Earth surface, they are among the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems and represent the bulk of many ecological processes and services. The assessment of biodiversity is an important and essential goal to achieve but it can results difficult, time consuming and expensive when based on field data. Remote sensing covers large areas and provides consistent quality and standardized data, which can be used to estimate species diversity.

Powerline inspection is an important task for electric power management. Corridor mapping, i.e. the task of surveying the surroundings of the line and detecting potentially hazardous vegetation and objects, is performed by aerial LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) survey. To this purpose, main tasks are automatic extraction of the wires, and measurement of distance of objects close to the line.

Post event flooding maps are currently extracted from synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) and/or optical satellite images or developing using hydraulic model simulations. Several sources of uncertainties impact the accuracy of such flood maps constructed from each method, especially in urban areas. An integrated approach that combines satellite imagines of flooded areas, hydraulic models, and markers from social media that should reduce these uncertainties and allow a more accurate reconstruction of flooded urban areas, is presented in this paper.