SHIP MONITORING IN JAPAN USING SAR, AIS AND EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITES

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has some instruments aboard satellites for understanding of marine context. Two satellite-based automatic identification system (AIS) receivers, named SPace-based AIS Experiment 1 (SPAISE1) on the Small Demonstration Satellite-4 (SDS-4) and SPAISE2 on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 (ALOS-2) has the wide observation coverage to enable to support a wide range of search and rescue and traffic monitoring activities and to assist with maritime security. ALOS-2 is also equipped with the Panchromatic L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR-2) that has the special feature of being able to make observations of ships, including no signal transmission of AIS. Simultaneous observations with SPAISE2 and PALSAR-2 on the identical satellite bring both individual ship information and fleet distribution including small ships with no AIS signals. Satellite-based AIS systems and SAR ship detection technique combined with sea surface temperature (SST) and other parameters derived from earth observation satellites (e. g. Global Change Observation Mission - Water (GCOMW)) can provide the detailed distributions of ships and fleets with environmental information.