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sentinel-1-global-mosaics·dataset

Monthly global radar view of Earth's surface

Sentinel-1 Global Mosaics
land ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. It shows how strongly the land bounces radar signals back to the satellite, combined into monthly global mosaics. Because radar sees through clouds and works day or night, it captures the surface in all weather.

How it's made. Produced by ESA Copernicus by stacking a month of terrain-corrected Sentinel-1 radar observations and computing a weighted average, with two mosaic types made each month.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for monitoring surface conditions regardless of cloud cover, including flooding, land and ice changes, and broad land-cover patterns where optical imagery falls short.

What's measured

SentinelCopernicusESAGRDSARC-BandGlobalEUEC

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2020-01-01 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90

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

Sentinel-1 monthly mosaics are generated from monthly stacks of Sentinel-1 GRD data by calculating the weighted sum of the terrain corrected backscatter observations. Two different Sentinel-1 mosaics are being produced for each month: IW mosaic and DH mosaic.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
    collections=["sentinel-1-global-mosaics"],   # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
    bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60),             # your area (W,S,E,N)
    datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items())            # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray
Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.