Raw light and heat readings (Sentinel-3A)
What it measures. Raw, calibrated readings of light and heat across all of the SLSTR sensor's channels: brightness temperature (how warm a surface looks) for the heat channels, and reflected energy for the visible and infrared ones. It also includes quality flags and pixel classifications.
How it's made. Produced from the SLSTR dual-scan radiometer on the ESA Sentinel-3A satellite as a geolocated Level-1 product, before being turned into temperature maps.
How & where you'd use it. A building-block input aimed at deriving very accurate sea and land surface temperatures, including dedicated fire-detection channels; most users reach it through higher-level temperature products.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2016-04-20 → ongoing
- Measured bySentinel-3A (SLSTR)
- Processing levelLevel 1B
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- FormatsnetCDF-4
- StatusACTIVE
What you can do with it
- Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
- Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
- Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description
The SLSTR/Sentinel-3A L1 Full Resolution Top of Atmosphere Radiances and Brightness Temperature product with shortname S3A_SL_1_RBT, is generated from the data aquired by the Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR), on-board SENTINEL-3, is a dual scan temperature radiometer. The principal aim of the SLSTR instrument is to maintain continuity with the AATSR series of instruments. The SLSTR instrument design incorporates the basic functionality of AATSR in addition to new, more advanced features including a wider swath, new channels (including two channels dedicated to fire detection), and higher resolution in some channels. The principal objective of SLSTR products is to provide global and regional Sea and Land Surface Temperature (SST, LST) to a very high level of accuracy (better than 0.3 K) for both climatological and meteorological applications. For more information about the instrument and the mission, visit [Sentinel Online](https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/home). The S3A_SL_1_RBT is a Level 1B product which consist of full resolution, geolocated, co-located nadir and along track view, Top of Atmosphere (TOA) brightness temperatures (in the case of thermal IR channels) or radiances (in the case of visible, NIR and SWIR channels) from all SLSTR channels. It also contains quality flags, pixel classification information and meteorological annotations. Based on components activated by configuration which are not part of the operational production baseline, the S3A_SL_1_RBT may contain 77 or 111 files. Out of the these files, 22 or 34 files contain the actual measurements, where the other 54 or 76 files contain the annotations data. For more information about the product, read the SENTINEL-3 SLSTR [User Guide](https://sentinel.esa.int/web/sentinel/user-guides/sentinel-3-slstr)
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="S3A_SL_1_RBT",
version="1",
bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9), # your area (W,S,E,N)
temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"), # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results) # stream straight from LAADSBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.