Technical
RADD
Also known as: Radar for Detecting Deforestation, Wageningen RADD
TL;DR
Wageningen University's near-real-time radar-based deforestation alert — uses Sentinel-1 SAR to detect tropical forest loss even through cloud cover.
Full explainer
RADD — Radar for Detecting Deforestation — is a near-real-time deforestation alert system developed by Wageningen University, based on Sentinel-1 synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imagery from the European Space Agency. Unlike optical sensors (Sentinel-2, Landsat), SAR penetrates cloud cover, making RADD particularly valuable in the perpetually-cloudy Indonesian tropics where optical alerts (GLAD-S2) frequently miss the actual disturbance window.
RADD alerts are published to GFW with a typical latency of a few days from the underlying Sentinel-1 acquisition. The product covers Indonesia and the rest of the tropics at 10m resolution. RADD is the highest-priority alert layer in the KarbonLens integrity-score MRV pipeline because of its tropics-focused, cloud-piercing reliability; GLAD-S2 and DIST-ALERT serve as cross-checks.
Authoritative source
GFW — about RADD →Related terms