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Sentinel-1 stack viewer

Date: Jan 14, 2025

We at EarthDaily Analytics (formerly Descartes Labs) have built a number of tools over the last few years to work with Sentinel-1 data quickly and efficiently. Hopefully, this will be the first in a series of posts showcasing these capabilities. And what better way than showcasing this with GIFs of screen captures when using our "iris" tool.

When an AOI of interest is identified or requested for generating insights over, the very first step involves determining the availability of Sentinel-1 data at the burst level over this AOI. At the same time, it is also helpful to determine if we have higher level products already available in our catalog to run quicklook insight tools on them.

Shown below is a screen capture of how the "Stack viewer" tool in "Iris" quickly shows Sentinel-1 acquired over an AOI by ESA, as well as the higher level products over the AOI derived from that data. The tooling here can be easily extended to cover other missions / datasets in the future. In this case, we also show if NASA OPERA CSLCs are available for the corresponding burst footprint.

The "Iris" viewer and the tools within are built on top of our platform whose API documentation can be found on docs.descarteslabs.com. Examples of using this API to programatically perform similar queries can be found in this notebook.

Brief description of GIFยค

  1. Open iris viewer and switch to stack viewer mode. Highlight time window selector.

  2. Zoom to an area of interest - say Las Vegas, Nevada.

  3. Search for available footprints

  4. Explore data availability by individual burst footprint. If nothing shows up, it means that the footprint was not acquired in the selected time period.