SAR-MPC News
In this section, we highlight main events related to products evolution, or new publications on product performances.
Publication of the Sentinel-1 Annual Performance Report 2023
Date: 2023-04-22
The annual performance report for the Sentinel-1 mission for 2023 is available [Here].
It contains the full status of Sentinel-1 product performances (Level 1, Level 2, ETAD products) and the full list of quality disclaimers currently published (available as well on this site).
Compared to previous yearly reports it contains results of long-term monitoring of the mission, as for instance below for interferometric baseline component from 2015 ("current" cycle vs previous one).
Publication of the Sentinel-1A N-Cyclic Report (last report of 2023)
Date: 2023-03-22
A new edition of the Sentinel-1A mission N-Cyclic Performance Report is available [Here] (8th N-Cyclic Performance Report of 2023)
Performance Reports are provided for periods of four cycles (48 days) to report the status of the mission to the end-users. This document provides a status on the S1-A sensor and product performance for orbit repeat cycle 297 to 300.
Please notice that the N-Cyclic Performances Reports are regularly unpublished once the Annual Performance Report covering the same period are available. The Annual Performance Report contains much more information.
How to improve temporal consistence in S1 radiometric time series ?
Date: 2024-02-02
A while ago, Kersten Schmidt, et al from the SAR-MPC, has published a paper on how to improve temporal consistence in S1 radiometric time series using an easy post-processing approach.
We use this method for long term monitoring of Sentinel-1 products performances taking into account successive improvment of radiometric calibration.
The paper is available here Radiometric Re-Compensation of Sentinel-1 SAR Data Products for Artificial Biases due to Antenna Pattern Changes
The method is using the archives of auxiliary data files (ADF) available on the SAR-MPC website. A Rest API allows accessing them easily (the documentation of the interface is here).
We now continue the work aiming to provide consistent and improved noise vectors for the thermal de-noising of fresh and archive S1 data.
Availability of ETAD products
Date: 2024-01-16
Publication of the Sentinel-1 mission N-Cyclic Report
Date: 2023-09-20
A new edition of the Sentinel-1 mission N-Cyclic Performance Report is available [Here] (fifth N-Cyclic Performance Report of 2023)
Performance Reports are provided every four cycles (48 days) to report the status of the mission to the end-users. This document provides a status on the S1-A sensor and product performance for orbit repeat cycle 297 to 300.
Please notice that the N-Cyclic Performances Reports are regularly unpublished once the Annual Performance Report covering the same period are available. The Annual Performance Report contains much more information.
Solar activity
Date : 2023-08-03
We are in a period of increase of solar activity. This increases the numbers of geomagnetic storms that make it more difficult to predict and restitute the orbits of the Sentinel-1 mission. During such events some predicted (AUX_PREORB) and restituted (AUX_RESORB) may have an accuracy worse than their performance requirements.
A Quality Disclaimer presenting the list degraded AUX_PREORB, AUX_RESORB and of Sentinel-1 Level-1 products generated with those orbit files is available https://sar-mpc.eu/disclaimer/159/ for the period January to July 2023.
Future quality disclaimer on this topic will be published monthly.
The precise orbit ephemerid orbits (AUX_POEORB) are not impacted.
Publication of the Sentinel-1 mission N-Cyclic Report
Date : 2023-01-19
A new edition of the Sentinel-1 mission N-Cyclic Performance Report is available [Here]
Performance Reports are provided every four cycles (48 days) to report the status of the mission to the end-users. This document provides a status on the S1-A sensor and product performance for orbit repeat cycle 277 to 280.
Please notice that the N-Cyclic Performances Reports are regularly unpublished once the Annual Performance Report covering the same period are available. The Annual Performance Report contains much more information. Next edition for 2022 will be available in the coming weeks.
New version of Sentinel-1 product specification
Date: 2022-10-11
A new version of the Sentinel-1 product specification (version 3.12) is now available Here
This version of the product specification will be used by the SAR processor IPF 3.60 to be deployed in the coming months.
This version of the processor is introducing the following main changes:
- general improvment of robustness of the processing (Level 1 and Level 2)
- ensure complete coverage in range of the denoising vectors for GRD products
- annotation of the complete set of Level 0 products used as input of the processing
- adding some additional global variables in the Level 2 NetCDF content
- using a new coastline in the Level 2 processing (OpenStreetMap instead of GSHHS)
- introducing quicklooks of Level2 Wind and Radial Velocity Measurements for TOPS and Stripmap products
Sample products will be made available in the coming weeks.
CEOS SAR WGCV 2022
The results from the SAR MPC will be presented in the CEOS Working Group on Calibration and Validation (WGCV), SAR Subgroup Workshop 2022 (CEOS SAR WGCV 2022)
This workshop takes place on October 18-21, 2022 Montreal, Canada
Two presentations of SAR-MPC results will be exposed on radiometric performances and rfi mitigation.
Total significant wave height is now provided for the Sentinel-1 Wave Mode acquisitions
Date: 2022-06-29
Since the beginning of operations of the Sentinel-1 mission, Wave Mode OCN products contain the significant wave height of the swell for each wave partition observed by the SAR instrument.
Since 2022-06-07, the Wave Mode OCN products contain as well the "Total" significant wave height (not only from the swell component) as extracted using the Neural Network algorithm described in [Quach et al 2020] and trained on altimeter measurements.
Two new variables are provided: oswTotalHs (significant wave height) and oswTotalHsStdev (standard deviation of significant wave height). These variables are qualified as "total" to avoid any confusion with the oswHs variable that is already used for the significant wave height of the swell for each wave partition in the products.
The first operational validation of this new measurement illustrates good match with reference mean Hs from CMEMS, as can be seen by the scatter plot and metrics provided in the figure below.
[Quach et al 2020] Quach, B., Glaser, Y., Stopa, J. E., Mouche, A. A., & Sadowski, P. (2020). Deep learning for predicting significant wave height from synthetic aperture radar. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 59(3), 1859-1867.
Sentinel-1 mission performance and product evolution in Living Planet 2022
Date: 2022-03-21
The status of the Sentinel-1 mission and the product evolutions will be presented during a dedicated session of the Living Planet 2022 symposium.
The Sentinel-1 product users will be able to meet representatives of the SAR Mission Performance Cluster during the
Update of IPF
Date: 2022-03-15
An evolution of the Sentinel-1 processing baseline will be introduced on 23 March for all newly generated products. This evolution features two main items:
- A minor evolution of the Sentinel-1 Level-2 OCN product format, in line with the product format version 3.11. The subject product format specifications are available here together with a set of corresponding sample products.
- Further to our news of 03 September 2021 the correction of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) will be applied to IW and EW products.
This evolution will be activated with the deployment of the new instrument processor version 3.5.1.
Products generated after the deployment of this version will tag version 3.5.1 of the operational processor in the corresponding product metadata and will be aligned with the new product format specifications 3.11.
Publication of Annual Performance Report 2021
Date: 2022-03-04
The annual performance report for the Sentinel-1 mission was published on 2022-03-04