Making effective use of this data requires definition of the way relevant information is represented in the imagery, and development of automatic methods to extract this information. This, in turn, requires an understanding of the physics of the sensor, the propagation medium and the interaction of radiation with the Earth's surface, and the way information is transformed as it passes through the remote sensing system.
Current research is centred on the properties of airborne and space-borne radar.
Airborne radar, especially multi-frequency polarimetric data, allows deep insight into how radar interacts with natural terrain. Spaceborne radar uses simpler systems but provides a multi-temporal capability for studying the Earth's dynamic processes. These methods are being applied to problems in hydrology, forest mapping, agricultural monitoring and in the larger context of understanding the role of vegetation in the carbon cycle. This work is linked to that of the Sheffield Centre for Earth Observation Science . The measurements are obtained using approximate solutions, both numerical and empirical, to a non-linear integral equation which relates the electromagnetic back scatter to the ocean wave directional spectrum.