Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/sentinel-3-sr-2-lan-hy-ntc
sentinel-3-sr-2-lan-hy-ntc·dataset

Calibrated water levels of lakes and rivers (Copernicus)

Sentinel-3 SRAL Land Radar Altimetry - Hydrology (NTC)
ocean ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. Estimated surface heights of inland lakes and rivers, showing how their water levels change over time.

How it's made. Produced from the SRAL radar altimeter on ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 satellites as a Level-2 hydrology product, in a fully quality-checked version.

How & where you'd use it. Valuable for long-term studies of river basins, lake trends, and freshwater availability where accuracy is the priority.

What's measured

SentinelCopernicusESASatelliteRadarAltimetryLandEUEC

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2016-03-01 → 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-2 Land Altimetry Hydrology products, which contains surface topography estimations of lakes and rivers.

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-2-lan-hy-ntc"],   # 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.