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sentinel-1-grd·dataset

Radar ground imagery of Earth's surface (Copernicus)

Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD)
land ESA ESA Copernicus AWS Earth Search active
In plain English

What it measures. This is radar imagery showing how strongly the ground bounces radar signals back to the satellite, which reveals surface texture and structure. Because it uses radar rather than light, it sees through clouds and works day or night.

How it's made. Made by ESA Copernicus from the Sentinel-1 C-band radar satellite, processed to Level-1 by detecting, averaging, and projecting the signal onto a map using an Earth model and terrain heights.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for tracking floods, oil spills, sea ice, ship traffic, and land changes, even when cloud cover would block ordinary cameras.

What's measured

C-BandCopernicusECESAEUGRDIW_GRDH_1SPT24HSARSentinelSentinel-1

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2014-10-04 → 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

Level-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) products consist of focused SAR data that has been detected, multi-looked and projected to ground range using the Earth ellipsoid model WGS84. The ellipsoid projection of the GRD products is corrected using the terrain height specified in the product general annotation. The terrain height used varies in azimuth and it is constant in range (For IW/EW modes only the terrain height of first subswath is considered)

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-grd"],   # 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.
earthsearch_access.pyAWS Earth Search · no login
# AWS Earth Search — anonymous, no login (cloud-optimized on S3)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://earth-search.aws.element84.com/v1")
items = cat.search(
    collections=["sentinel-1-grd"],
    bbox=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),   # your area (W,S,E,N)
    datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
).item_collection()
# open assets straight from S3 with rioxarray / stackstac — no credentials
Also mirrored on AWS Earth Search — the same data, cloud-optimized on public S3, anonymous (no login at all).