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Full catalog/SENTINEL-1A_META_RAW
SENTINEL-1A_META_RAW·v1·dataset

Bookkeeping info for raw radar files (Sentinel-1A)

Sentinel-1A Level 0 Product Metadata
land NASA ASF Level Not provided active
In plain English

What it measures. Not the radar imagery itself, but the bookkeeping records that describe raw Sentinel-1A radar files: orbit and timing information and other annotations needed to find and process the data.

How it's made. Created by the Alaska Satellite Facility as standardized metadata files describing the unprocessed Level 0 radar packets from Europe's Sentinel-1A satellite.

How & where you'd use it. A behind-the-scenes catalog product for people working with raw radar data; the raw files themselves must be decompressed and processed with specialized software before they show anything.

What's measured

AGRICULTURE › FOREST SCIENCE › REFORESTATIONBIOSPHERE › ECOSYSTEMS › TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMSCRYOSPHERE › FROZEN GROUND › PERMAFROSTCRYOSPHERE › FROZEN GROUND › ROCK GLACIERSCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIER ELEVATION/ICE SHEET ELEVATIONCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIER MOTION/ICE SHEET MOTIONCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIER THICKNESS/ICE SHEET THICKNESSCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIER TOPOGRAPHY/ICE SHEET TOPOGRAPHYCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › GLACIERSCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › ICE SHEETSCRYOSPHERE › GLACIERS/ICE SHEETS › ICEBERGSCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE DEFORMATIONCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE DEPTH/THICKNESSCRYOSPHERE › SEA ICE › ICE EDGES

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2014-04-03 → ongoing
  • Measured bySentinel-1A (C-SAR)
  • Processing levelLevel Not provided
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • 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

Sentinel-1A, the first satellite in the Sentinel-1 constellation, was launched April 3, 2014. The Sentinel-1 satellites (Sentinel-1A, Sentinel-1B, and Sentinel-1C) are sun-synchronous polar-orbiting satellites that operate day and night performing C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging. The Sentinel-1 satellites operate in four imaging modes with different resolutions (down to 5 meters) and coverage (up to 400 kilometers). The Sentinel-1 satellites provide dual polarization capability and short revisit times. Sentinel-1A Level 0 products consist of compressed and unprocessed instrument source packets, with additional annotations and auxiliary information to support processing. Level 0 products are the basis from which all other high level products are produced. They are compressed using Flexible Dynamic Block Adaptive Quantization (FDBAQ) which provides a variable bit rate coding that increases the number of bits allocated to bright scatterers. For the data to be usable, it will need to be decompressed and processed using focusing software. Level 0 data includes noise, internal calibration and echo source packets as well as orbit and attitude information. he products in this collection are ISO compliant XML metadata created by the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center from the associated Sentinel-1A SAFE format product.

Get the data

sentinel-1a_meta_raw_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SENTINEL-1A_META_RAW",
    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 ASF
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.