Medium-resolution radar ground images (Sentinel-1B)
What it measures. Medium-resolution radar images of the ground that work day or night and see through clouds, projected onto a map of Earth's surface.
How it's made. Collected by the C-band synthetic aperture radar on Europe's Sentinel-1B satellite, then focused, multi-looked, and projected to ground range using an Earth model corrected for terrain height.
How & where you'd use it. Used to monitor land and surface conditions in any weather or lighting. As a fairly raw radar image product, it is often a basis for further mapping and analysis. Sentinel-1B's mission ended in 2022.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2016-04-25 → 2021-12-24
- Measured bySentinel-1B (C-SAR)
- Processing levelLevel 1
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
- StatusCOMPLETE
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-1B, the second satellite in the Sentinel-1 constellation, was launched April 25, 2016. 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. The spacecraft experienced an anomaly related to the instrument electronics power supply provided by the satellite platform, leaving it unable to deliver radar data on 23 December 2021, as a consequence, ESA and the European Commission announced the end of the Sentinel-1B mission on August 3, 2022. Sentinel-1B 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 and is specified in the product’s general annotation. The terrain height used varies in azimuth and it is constant in range (only the terrain height of first subswath is considered for Interferometric Wide (IW) and Extra Wide (EW) swath modes). Ground range coordinates are the slant range coordinates projected onto the ellipsoid of the Earth. Pixel values represent detected amplitude. Phase information is lost. The resulting product has approximately square resolution pixels and square pixel spacing with reduced speckle at a cost of reduced spatial resolution. For IW and EW GRD products, multi-looking is performed on each burst individually. All bursts in all sub-swaths are then seamlessly merged to form a single, contiguous, ground range, detected image per polarization. The single polarization, medium resolution GRD data products in this collection mirror the Sentinel-1B products provided through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem.
Get the data
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc") # free Earthdata Login
results = earthaccess.search_data(
short_name="SENTINEL-1B_SP_GRD_MEDIUM",
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 ASFBrowsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package. Official links
- Search and download data granules using the ASF Data Search graphical search interface Vertex. GET DATA
- Search and download data granules using NASA Earthdata Search interface. GET DATA
- Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission home page VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
- ASF created Sentinel-1 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION