Here are some examples of some of our favorite

SAR Images

These first four images are copyrighted by European Space Agency. You can see more examples of ERS images on the ASF home page. There is also a CD-ROM available from ASF that contains these and more SAR images plus captions.


This is a section of the Beaufort Sea as seen from the ERS-1 in the Winter of 1992. The three tiny dots in the central region of the picture are three corner reflectors. Multi-year ice is bright, while first-year ice is dark gray. The long, linear features are leads (rhymes with 'weeds'). Leads are areas where the ice has previously moved apart to expose open water, which is where new ice quickly forms.

Also taken by the ERS-1, this is the Alfred Ernest Ice Shelf on Ellesmere Island. March 1, 1992. The ice shelf is the dark gray area between mountains. Sea ice is seen at the top of the image next to the shelf, which is a glacier that extends beyond land.

The Malaspina Glacier in Alaska was captured by the ERS-1 SAR on July 18, 1992.The glacier has a dark core surrounded by radiating bright lines. The open ocean is at the top of the image. A ship (bright dot) and its dark wake can be seen also.

This large ocean eddy was captured by the ERS-1 SAR in the Shelikof Strait, Alaska. Oct. 28, 1991. An eddy is formed when a meandering current is pinched off, which forms a rotating current. The eddy is seen by the near-circular concentric lines. Eddies in this region are important for fisheries.

This image combines the data of the ERS-1 (darker green) with that of the JERS-1 (lighter purple) to obtain the most accurate image map of a given area. This image is courtesy of C. Wivell, EROS Data Center.

This is a radar image taken by the Shuttle Imaging Radar-C showing two large ocean eddies next to sea ice in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica, on October 5, 1994, The eddies sweep up loose bits of sea ice, mostly pancake ice, in their rotating currents. Very new ice is seen in the darkest areas. First- year ice is green. Open ocean is blue. The image was processed with the ASF Radarsat processor. It has a larger size than all the other SAR images seen here, having a size of 240km by 360 km. The colors are denied by combining 3 radar channels: L-band VV is blue, L-Band HV is green, and C-band VV is red. RADARSAT will obtain images 4 times as large as this image!

This SAR image is of the Kuskokwim River delta, Western Alaska. It was taken by Seasat on July 13, 1978. The patterns are formed by river water flowing around sand bars. The pock-marked land is covered by small permafrost lakes.

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