A major advantage of having access to the X-SAR COSMO-SkyMed constellation four satellites is their ability to acquire a high number of scenes; hence providing the opportunity for high temporal coverage, with a minimum of 18 min between consecutive passes through a daily acquisition window over the Terra Nova Bay of approximately 6 h per day (from 22:00 to 4:00 AM UTC).
The COSMO-SkyMed (CSK) scenes used in this study are ordered by satellite platform in the first rows of Table 1 (with symbols from CSK1 to CSK4). We used standard Level 1C products (geo-coded and ellipsoid-corrected, GEC) obtained multi-looking and projecting the raw data in a chosen cartographic system. The data consist of “so-called” Himage scenes at high spatial resolution scenes covering portions of the bay (symbol ‘HI’, swath of 40 km, pixel of 5 m) and “so-called” HugeRegion scenes covering the whole bay (symbol ‘HR’, swath of 200 km, resolution of 100m per pixel). Both, Himage and HugeRegion scenes were acquired from 20 to 27 of July, only HugeRegion scenes were acquired from 7 to 19 of September. The images were acquired with HH polarization and incidence angles between 22 and 45 degrees at the near range, and were radiometrically calibrated.