Narayana Rao Bhogapurapu

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has become a cornerstone of modern precision agriculture because it provides high-resolution imagery regardless of weather conditions or daylight. Recent advancements in satellite technology, driven by missions such as Sentinel-1, NISAR, and commercial constellations, have introduced shorter revisit times and multi-polarization capabilities, enabling continuous monitoring of dynamic farming environments. This talk explores how modern Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) missions are transforming agricultural monitoring and decision-making. Presented by Prof. Narayanarao Bhogapurapu, it highlights how all-weather, day-and-night SAR observations can be used for crop classification, growth-stage monitoring, soil moisture estimation, and biophysical parameter retrieval. The session emphasizes the strengths of recent and upcoming SAR missions, including improved revisit times, multi-frequency and polarimetric capabilities, and open data access, in supporting precision agriculture, food security, and sustainable land management.

Biography:

Dr. Narayanarao Bhogapurapu is an Assistant Professor of Geoinformatics in the Department of Civil Engineering at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) Warangal, India. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of remote sensing, geospatial technologies, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), polarimetric SAR (PolSAR), and Earth observation, with applications in agriculture, forestry, urban studies, environmental monitoring, and planetary science.

Dr. Bhogapurapu received his Ph.D. in Geoinformatics and Natural Resources Engineering from IIT Bombay (2019–2023), where his doctoral research focused on “Soil moisture retrieval over croplands using PolSAR data.” He completed his M.Tech. in Remote Sensing and GIS from NIT Warangal and his B.E. in Civil Engineering from Andhra University.

His professional experience includes research positions at the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and work with CropIn Technology Solutions, where he worked on soil-moisture estimation and crop monitoring using SAR data. At Caltech, his research included ISRO L- and S-band airborne SAR data calibration, above-ground biomass estimation, and forest-height estimation using InSAR and LiDAR data. 

A major focus of his research has been the development of SAR-based approaches for soil-moisture retrieval and agricultural monitoring. His work has investigated dual-polarimetric and full/compact-polarimetric SAR data, including the development of radar vegetation descriptors for soil-moisture estimation. His research has been published in journals including Remote Sensing of Environment, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Advances in Space Research, and IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing. 

He is also one of the developers associated with PolSARtools, a QGIS-based/open-source toolkit for generating and processing SAR descriptors, which has contributed to making polarimetric SAR analysis more accessible to the remote-sensing and geospatial research community. 

Dr. Bhogapurapu has received several recognitions for his research. These include the IEEE GRSS Mikio Takagi Student Prize at IGARSS 2022 for outstanding research presented at the symposium and the Naik and Rastogi Excellence in Ph.D. Thesis Award from IIT Bombay for his doctoral research. He was also recognized with the Indian Society of Remote Sensing (ISRS) I-CON Silver Award in 2025. 

He has actively contributed to the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) community through conference and technical activities, including serving as a session chair/manager at IEEE GRSS events. More recently, he has delivered talks and technical sessions on NISAR, polarimetric SAR processing, SAR technologies, and machine learning applications in agriculture. In 2026, he was among the distinguished speakers at the IEEE GRSS Summer School on “Harnessing SAR and Machine Learning for Indian Agriculture.”

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