radar sounding

New features have been added to SOPA:

• a square facet simulator using a cos^exp law to weight the effect of surfaces not facing the radar;
• the possibility to create maps of the estimated locations of the first returns for each frame;
• the possibility to create radargram-like images showing the minimum/maximum ground distance from the nadir point of the surface clutter contributions summing up in the simulations;
• plotting tools for quick visualization of all the main outputs of SOPA.

Have a look at the new features on the SOPA project page, and in particular on the new examples page!

The python3 open processing suite for SHARAD data SOPA now includes also the focuser SOFA!

Working with SHARAD data, starting from raw unfocused echoes to (squinted) processed radargrams is now only a few lines of code away.

Check it out on the SOPA project page.

By now, SOFA can focus only night time radargrams as no correction of ionosphere effects has been implemented yet... let me work on that ;)

Another project on radar sounder data: SOPA, which means SHARAD Open Focusing Attempt.
The idea behind SOPA is to create a common and simple python v3 API for reading, simulating and focusing available SHARAD data.
The development of SOPA is still ongoing. It already includes several interfaces for existing SHARAD data and a simple simulator. Check the details in the project dedicated page!

The International Journal of Remote Sensing published a paper I wrote about possible results and measurements obtained using SOFA.

The final paper is available at this link.

You can find the post-print version of the published paper here:

A. Ferro, Squinted SAR focusing for improving automatic radar sounder data analysis and enhancement (18 Mb)
International Journal of Remote Sensing, Feb. 2019
DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2019.1573339

After a long time, a new project is online: SOFA! SOFA stands for SHARAD Open Focusing Attempt. This is an old code that I used to make some sofa-spare-time experiments on the SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) data acquired on Mars.
It allows focusing the raw radargrams using different squint angles and apertures. As shown in the Radargram enhancement and target physical slope estimation page, this processing makes it possible to visually enhance radargrams and obtain further physical information on subsurface targets.
As usual, a documentation and a download page are available!
I'm pretty sure that with this piece of code you will find water on Mars!
If so, let me know from the Contacts page!