Sentinel-1 is the operational C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite mission of the European Copernicus Program providing weather and sunlight Independent radar imagery of the whole Earth on a 6 to 12 day cycle. However, there is a strong reluctance to use SAR data because of its complexity in regard to sensor-specific noise, topographic effects, (pre-)processing requirements, unfamiliar appearance for interpretation. These technical and human capacity requirements as well as the vast amount of data makes it out of reach for most non-technical user groups that could benefit from its monitoring potential in general and especially in persistently cloud-covered areas as the tropics.
This project aims to overcome these technical challenges and subjective reluctance by providing attractive, easy-to-use “Advanced Sentinel-1 Analysis Ready Data” (ASARD) imagery with a focus on African users. Such imagery needs to be timely accessible, visually attractive and easier interpretable without losing essential information for the users monitoring needs and potential further numerical analysis. Such information could for example be conserved by statistical analysis of dense time series and providing noise-reduced mosaics instead of single satellite images.
By a demand-driven approach involving five African countries (D.R. Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi and South Africa), we aim to standardize such ASARD imagery to boost the use of Sentinel-1 data for a wider non-technical user community, including policy makers, in order to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
We will also investigate cloud processing possibilities and cooperate with the African Regional Data Cube (ARDC) to ease the operational provision and access of such data in the future in near-real time.
