URBAN SCIENCE DAYS 2/N A series of workshops toward a scientific understanding of global urbanization and the built environment The Global Urban Footprint A new Perspective for the worldwide inventory of the Human Settlements Pattern. Dr. THOMAS ESCH German Aerospace Center - Earth Observation Center 26 May - 15:15 - CM 0 12 - The ongoing global phenomenon of people migrating to cities is referred to as urbanization and primarily manifests itself in the continuous and often rapid spatial expansion of urban agglomerations. Nevertheless, the dimension and structuring behind this process can be considered as a spatial continuum ranging from rural to urban settlements. Accordingly, gathering a detailed global knowledge about the size, form (e.g., compact or spread) and spatial distribution (e.g., dispersed or nucleated) of different types of settlements represents a major issue to better understand urbanization and develop effective mitigation, adaptation and management strategies. The TerraSAR-X add-on for digital elevation measurement (TanDEM-X) is a German Earth observation mission collecting a total of two global coverages of very high resolution (VHR) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) X-band data with a spatial resolution of around three meters in the years 2011 to 2013. With these, the TanDEM-X mission (TDM) provides a unique data set that is highly valuable for the analysis and monitoring of the global human settlements pattern. This presentation introduces the basic methodology for a fully-operational detection and delineation of built-up areas from VHR SAR data along with a description of the resulting global settlement mask - the Global Urban Footprint (GUF). The GUF shows a high potential with respect to an analysis of urbanization patterns, peri-urbanization, spatio-temporal dynamics of settlement development as well as population estimation, vulnerability assessment and modeling of global change. ENAC Incentive Program on Urban Dimension Explorations in Urban Scaling Project Strano, Giometto, Bertuzzo, Zaoli, Cavalieri, Barcelloni Corte, Cogato Lanza, Viganò, Golay, Rinaldo.