The Sentinel-1 Global Backscatter Model (S1GBM) - Polar Extension

• Main Authors: Bauer-Marschallinger, Bernhard, Cao, Senmao, Navacchi, Claudio, Freeman, Vahid, Reuß, Felix, Geudtner, Dirk, Rommen, Björn, Vega, Francisco Ceba, Snoeij, Paul, Attema, Evert, Reimer, Christoph, Wagner, Wolfgang
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: TU Wien 2022
• Subjects: The Sentinel; Antarc*; Antarctica; Sea ice
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.48436/r9fn3-nyd51

This dataset was generated by the Remote Sensing Group of the TU Wien Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation (https://mrs.geo.tuwien.ac.at/), within a dedicated project by the European Space Agency (ESA). Rights are reserved with ESA. Open use is granted under the CC BY 4.0 license. With the recently published Sentinel-1 Global Backscatter Model (S1GBM) Version 1.0, we provide a new perspective on Earth's land surface through normalised microwave backscatter maps from Sentinel-1's Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations. This first extension of the S1GBM, V1.1, providing an additional set of normalised mosaics covering the northern and southern polar zones and sea ice regions. V1.1 ingests Medium-resolution data (GRDM) from Sentinel 1's Extra Wide (EW) swath mode in HV- and HH-polarisation, at a pixel sampling of 40m. To reflect cold and warm conditions in the high latitudes, and in particular to capture the varying snow pack extents along Greenland's coastline, data collections are set to the months January and July of the period 2016-17, respectively. Processing, normalisation- and mosaicking methods, and publication terms follow with minor adaptions the existing V1.0 dataset publication. We invite developers from the broader user community to exploit this novel data resource and to integrate S1GBM parameters in models for various variables of land cover, soil composition, or vegetation structure. Please be referred to our peer-reviewed article at Nature Scientific Data for details, generation methods, and an in-depth dataset analysis. In this publication, we demonstrate – as an example of the S1GBM's potential use – the mapping of permanent water bodies and evaluate the results against the Global Surface Water (GSW) benchmark. Dataset Record The HH and HV mosaics are sampled at 40 m pixel spacing, georeferenced to the Equi7Grid and divided into six continental zones (Antarctica, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America), which are further divided into square tiles of 300 km extent ...