SAR remote sensing of river morphodynamic on a monthly basis

Satellite remote sensed data provide the opportunity of observing rivers with high resolution in space and time and covering wide areas. For this reason, such data have been widely used to monitor river morphological changes in time (Marcus and Fonstad, 2010). In this study we propose the exploitation of satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. Although SAR data have been so far poorly used for river observation they have significant advantages over more widely used data such as for example optical one: cloud cover do not influence earth surface observation, the spatial resolution is very high (up to 1m) and the time resolution is also very high (about 15 days). In this study we retrieved from a multitemporal SAR dataset the surface covered by water, we tested the results against orthophotos and in situ measurements and observed the river morphological change in a time interval of 8 years with an average frequency of about one month.