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Full catalog/sentinel-3-sr-1-sra-a-nrt
sentinel-3-sr-1-sra-a-nrt·dataset

Raw radar altimeter echoes, near-real-time (Copernicus)

Sentinel-3 SRAL Radar Altimetry L-1A (NRT)
ocean ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. Location-tagged bursts of radar echoes bounced off the Earth's surface, with instrument calibrations applied but no surface heights yet calculated.

How it's made. Recorded by the SRAL radar altimeter aboard ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 satellites, packaged as an early-stage Level-1A product and delivered in near-real time.

How & where you'd use it. This is a low-level building block, not a finished map. It feeds the processing chain that later produces sea, lake, and ice surface heights.

What's measured

SentinelCopernicusESASatelliteRadarAltimetryEUEC

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2023-09-20 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

This Collection provides Sentinel-3 SRAL Level-1A products, which contains geo-located bursts of echoes with all calibrations applied.

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-3-sr-1-sra-a-nrt"],   # 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.