Monitoring crop development by remote sensing requires the acquisition of good-quality images that cannot be provided by optical satellites, given the high degree of cloud cover that characterises our country. However, wavelengths used for radar are insensitive to such atmospheric disturbances. Radar sensors can thus collect data regardless of the cloud cover. Those who are interested in monitoring fields over a growing season can thus count systematically on a score of radar images.

The project’s aim is to develop agricultural applications using images derived from interferometric pairs. Two specific aims have been achieved so far, namely:

• to analyse the relationship between interferometric coherence and crop variables such as the vegetation’s height and rate of ground coverage for the four most widespread crops in the study area, that is, wheat, sugar beets, maize, and potato; and

• to explore coherence’s contribution to crop classification.