The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
Go to topicThank you for liking
You have already liked this page, you can only like it once!
As a part of ESA’s SInCohMap project, which is dedicated to exploring innovative methodologies for land-cover and vegetation mapping using Sentinel-1 multitemporal coherence data, the usefulness of coherence time series for crop-type mapping has been demonstrated recently. The Sentinel-1 satellites’ radar instruments can transmit in either horizontal (H) or vertical (V) polarisation, and then receive in both H and V polarisations. The plots show the temporal patterns of coherence, both VV and VH, measured for four crop classes: alfalfa, maize, sugar beet and wheat. Alfalfa exhibits a long growth season, translated into low coherence, from January to September, whereas maize presents a much shorter cycle concentrated in summer.