Sentinel-1 data available on AWS and through Sentinel Hub
We are pleased to announce that Sentinel-1 data are available on the Open Public Dataset at AWS, hosted on eu-central-1 in Frankfurt, Germany. The dataset currently contains the data from 1st of May 2017, and it is regularly synchronized with OpenHub. We will continue adding imagery and keep a rolling archive of one year of data. This is for GRD data, though SLC products will also be available for the last two months as well. We have also re-encoded the imagery data on AWS to cloud optimized GeoTIFF to make the data more accessible and cloud processing friendly. The files have embedded multi-looked overviews as well, which allow for fast access to high quality data at lower resolutions.
Sentinel Hub services also offer Sentinel-1 GRD data from AWS. Simply open your WMS Configuration Utility tool, select Sentinel-1 as the data source, and configure your layers, set parameters, and use the WMS service to integrate it into your own GIS environment.
Or try it out yourself right now, see it in Sentinel Playground.
Sentinel-1 data is considerably more difficult to display than other satellites in real time (which are no trivial task either). Each pixel in an image needs to be converted to meaningful physical quantities (the backscatter coefficient) and geopositioned individually. There is no global mapping which can take care of this. Orthorectification is even more complicated as it requires the use of a digital elevation model, and again, adjusted for each pixel individually. Note: Sentinel Hub streamed imagery from AWS is not (yet) orthorectified. This will be supported soon.
Although Sentinel-1 data is not new to Sentinel Hub, the fast AWS architecture and cloud optimized GeoTIFFs allow for faster response times compared to the current service running on a different platform with original, non-cloud-optimized files. There are differences between the capabilities of the two services, for more details have a look here.
For more on interesting facts about Sentinel-1 visit our previous blog post on the Sentinel-1. Contact us, if you are interested in multi-temporal processing of Sentinel-1 GRD data.
