BACKGROUND

The European Space Agency organised its second SAR oceanography workshop, SEASAR 2008, entitled "Advances in SAR Oceanography from ENVISAT and ERS missions", hosted at ESA ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, from 21 to 25 January 2008.

OBJECTIVES

The main objectives of the workshop were to:

• Provide a forum for ESA Principal Investigators to present results and status of AO and Cat-1 projects
• Provide a forum for scientific exchange and to assess the state-of-art in SAR Coastal and Marine Application
• Initiate and encourage close collaboration between individual research groups
• Formulate recommendations for algorithm and new products development
• To present ESA studies results on wind, wave and currents from SAR data
• Discuss the use of SAR data over Ocean and their assimilation into meteorological models
• Present SAR marine services developed under GMES framework
• Assess the available data ordering and analysis tools
• Report on progress/status of recommendations of SeaSAR 2006

THEMES

• Wave mode processing algorithms, product validation and assimilation
• Ocean Wind applications
• Ocean Current applications
• Wave applications
• Ice applications
• Oil spill and ship detection
• Methodology and techniques
  

The workshop was organised around:

• Papers and posters selected by the Scientific Committee
• Round-table discussions with seed questions prepared by the Scientific Committee and ESA
• Demonstration of software tools