Ice 



Delivery of certain types of products must be accomplished 

 within 3 hours of data acquisition over certain 

 operational areas in northern ice infested/covered waters. 

 For scientific purposes, depending on the product and its 

 application, delivery time may vary from several days to 

 several weeks. 



d. Oceans 



Requirements are similar to those of the Ice Team. 

 Ideally, delivery of tapes or images produced from data 

 acquired over operational areas should be accomplished 

 within 1.5 hours. A compromise on the quantity and type 

 of products provided can be made if it will ensure the 

 delivery of operational data within the required time 

 frame. 



Discussion 



Data delivery requirements vary widely from application to 

 application. Extremely short delivery times for products 

 are essential to the operational use of SAR data for 

 certain ice and oceans applications. The 3-hour 

 turnaround time specified by the ice team applies to only 

 50 percent of their required area cover and represents 

 approximately 70 scenes per day. The quantity of data 

 delivered will obviously be limited if the stated oceans 

 requirement is to be met. It should be possible to meet 

 most of the product delivery requirements specified by the 

 Renewable Land Resources and Nonrenewable Land Resources 

 Teams. 



8. Calibration 



Requirements for calibration stated by applications teams are 

 summarized as follows: 



a. Renewable Land Resources 



It is estimated that for agricultural crops, 90 percent of 

 the backscatter will be within 6 dB at the C-band 

 frequency. Crop identification is of prime importance, 

 and if this is to be accomplished using SAR data, response 

 should be consistent to within 1/2 dB in a given scene and 

 be stable over a season for a given target within 1 dB, 



5-16 



