Assessment of tropical forest biomass: A challenging objective for the biomass mission

In terms of biomass information, the most critical forest regions of the Earth are in the tropical belt, where knowledge on biomass and biomass changes is poor and where biomass information is the most needed, for carbon flux calculations and for national scale inventory. The difficulty of making in situ inventories of biomass in the tropics, has therefore led to serious efforts to estimate biomass from space. P-band SAR, which is the longest wavelength radar systems possible appears the most suitable for biomass measurements, however, its performance in tropical forests still needed to be demonstrated. This was achieved by the design of the TropiSAR campaign in French Guiana, and the ensuing development of inversion algorithms, which will be presented in the paper.