A Sentinel-1 Backscatter Datacube for Global Land Monitoring Applications

• Published in: Remote Sensing
• Main Authors: Wolfgang Wagner, Bernhard Bauer-Marschallinger, Claudio Navacchi, Felix Reuß, Senmao Cao, Christoph Reimer, Matthias Schramm, Christian Briese
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2021
• Subjects: datacube; Sentinel-1; analysis-ready data; land monitoring; global; The Sentinel; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13224622

The Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites allow global monitoring of the Earth’s land surface with unprecedented spatio-temporal coverage. Yet, implementing large-scale monitoring capabilities is a challenging task given the large volume of data from Sentinel-1 and the complex algorithms needed to convert the SAR intensity data into higher-level geophysical data products. While on-demand processing solutions have been proposed to cope with the petabyte-scale data volumes, in practice many applications require preprocessed datacubes that permit fast access to multi-year time series and image stacks. To serve near-real-time as well as offline land monitoring applications, we have created a Sentinel-1 backscatter datacube for all continents (except Antarctica) that is constantly being updated and maintained to ensure consistency and completeness of the data record over time. In this technical note, we present the technical specifications of the datacube, means of access and analysis capabilities, and its use in scientific and operational applications.