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

Raw radar that sees through clouds (Sentinel-1A)

Sentinel-1A Level 0 Product
land NASA ASF Level 0 active
In plain English

What it measures. The rawest radar data from the satellite, compressed and unprocessed instrument packets, before any imaging is done. The radar works day and night and sees through clouds.

How it's made. Collected by the C-band synthetic aperture radar on the European Sentinel-1A satellite as Level-0 source packets, including calibration and orbit information.

How & where you'd use it. A raw building-block input that must be decompressed and focused with specialized software before it becomes usable imagery; nearly everyone uses the higher-level radar image products instead.

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 0
  • 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. The data products in this collection mirror the Sentinel-1A products provided through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem.

Get the data

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

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="SENTINEL-1A_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.