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sentinel-3-sr-2-lan-stc·dataset

Short-delay radar altimetry over land (Copernicus)

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

What it measures. Radar altimetry measurements over land, delivered as three data files in each product.

How it's made. Generated from the SRAL radar altimeter on ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 satellites as a Level-2 land product, in a "slow-time-critical" version.

How & where you'd use it. A land-altimetry package for monitoring inland water and land heights with a balance of speed and accuracy.

What's measured

SentinelCopernicusESASatelliteRadarAltimetryLandEUEC

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-07-30 → 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 products, which contains data on land radar altimetry measurements. Each product contains three NetCDF files.

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-stc"],   # 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.