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Abstract
Spaceborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) imaging is a well established technique to derive useful products for several land applications. One of the major limitations of InSAR is due to atmospheric effects, and in particular to high water vapor (WV) variability in troposphere. In general, the atmospheric artifacts are of the same order of magnitude of the ground motions to be measured, at times even much greater. Thus, the WV variability still remain a problem for InSAR processing and any information on its distribution could be useful for trying to correct, or at least to mitigate such effect. This work is related to the ESA project METAWAVE (Mitigation of Electromagnetic Transmission errors induced by Atmospheric Water Vapour Effects) where the above mentioned problematic is being investigated by a team composed of SAR experts, meteorologists, atmospheric remote sensing experts. In the frame of METAWAVE, a month-long field campaign has been conducted in Rome, deploying ground-based instruments (microwave radiometers, lidars, GPS) as well as radiosondes, and collecting high-resolution mesoscale model outputs (MM5) and satellite observations (MODIS, MERIS, InSAR). Preliminary results from the METAWAVE campaign in Rome on the characterization of the 3 dimentional WV field will be shown.