Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Alberto Moreira
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Director | Microwaves and Radar Institute
82230 Wessling | Oberpfaffenhofen
Professor | Institut für Hochfrequenztechnik und Elektronik
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) | 76128 Karlsruhe
Background
Alberto Moreira is Director of the Microwaves and Radar Institute at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and a Full Professor with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, in the field of microwave remote sensing. He received the B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from the Aeronautical Technological Institute (ITA), São José dos Campos, in 1984 and 1986, respectively, and the Eng. Dr. degree (with honors) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 1993.
From 1996 to 2001, he was the Chief Scientist and Engineer with the SAR Technology Department, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. Under his leadership, the DLR airborne SAR system has been upgraded to operate in innovative imaging modes like polarimetric SAR interferometry and SAR tomography. Since 2001, he is the Director of the Microwaves and Radar Institute of DLR. The Institute contributes to several scientific programs and space projects for actual and future airborne and spaceborne SAR missions like TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, SAR-Lupe and SAR-Lupe follow-on as well as Sentinel-1, BIOMASS and Tandem-L. The mission TanDEM-X, led by his Institute, has successfully started the operational phase in December 2010. Prof. Moreira is the initiator and Principal Investigator for this mission. TanDEM-X is the first bi-static spaceborne SAR mission consisting of two satellites flying in close formation and is generating a new global 3-D map of the Earth with unprecedented accuracy.
Research and educational activities
Alberto Moreira has more than 350 publications in international conferences and journals and is the holder of 18 patents in the radar and antenna field. His professional interests and research areas encompass radar end-to-end system design and analysis, innovative microwave techniques and system concepts, radar signal processing, and remote sensing applications. Current research work focuses on digital beamforming concepts for imaging radar systems, a technology that is now being adopted for the next generation of spaceborne SAR systems for global mapping of the Earth environment and its dynamics.
He has supervised or co-supervised more than 30 PhD students and has been lecturing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on spaceborne SAR remote sensing since 2003. He has regularly served as a lecturer in international courses and summer schools on Synthetic Aperture Radar since 1992.
Main professional activities
- 2012 - 2017 Principal Investigator (PI) for the Helmholtz-Alliance “Remote Sensing for Earth System Dynamics”, PI for the mission proposal Tandem-L
- 2000 - 2015 Spokesman of DLR’s Center of Excellence on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
- 2012 General Co-Chair of International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS 2012)
- 2010 President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS)
- 2001 – 2013 Member of the IEEE GRSS Administrative Committee (AdCom)
- 2009 - 2010 Chair of the Technical/Scientific Council of the German Aerospace Center (DLR)
- 2003 - 2008 Member of the Board of Directors of the VDE/ITG, Information Technology Society of the German Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies
- since 2006 Initiating and Principal Investigator (PI) for TanDEM-X
- since 2003 Member of the European Space Agency (ESA) Mission Advisory Group for Sentinel-1 (since 2011), Member of the SAR Science Advisory Group (2003-2010)
- 2003 - 2008 Chair and founder of the IEEE German Chapter of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
- since 2005 Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGARS), Associate Editor for IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (GRSL, 2003 – 2007)
- since 2000 General Chairman of EUSAR 2006, Awards Chairman of EUSAR 2000-2004, Technical Chairman of EUSAR 2000, General Co-Chair EURAD 2008, Co-Chair EUSAR 2008, Member of the technical committee of more than 50 conferences
Selected publications
- Moreira, A., Prats-Iraola, P., Younis, M., Krieger, G., Hajnsek, Irena and Papathanassiou, K.: A Tutorial on Synthetic Aperture Radar. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine, 1 (1), 2013, pp. 6-43.
- Huber, S. and Younis, M., Krieger, G., Patyuchenko, A. and Moreira, A.: Spaceborne Reflector SAR Systems with Digital Beamforming. IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, 48 (4), 2012, pp. 3473-3493.
- Krieger, Gerhard, Moreira, A., Fiedler, H., Hajnsek, I., Werner, M., Younis, M. and Zink, M.: TanDEM-X: A Satellite Formation for High Resolution SAR Interferometry. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 45 (11), 2007, pp. 3317-3341.
- Reigber, A. and Moreira, A.: First Demonstration of SAR Tomography using Polarimetric Airborne SAR Data. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 38 (5), 2000, pp. 2142-2152.
- Moreira, A. and Mittermayer, J. and Scheiber, R.: Extended Chirp Scaling Algorithm for Air- and Spaceborne SAR Data Processing in Stripmap and ScanSAR Imaging Modes. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, September 1996, 34, pp. 1123-1136
