Generating Accurate De-Noising Vectors for Sentinel-1: 10 Years of Continuous Improvements

The Copernicus Programme is a joint European initiative developed by the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) to provide accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive Earth observation data for environmental monitoring, climate change analysis, disaster management, and security. The Copernicus program comprises a series of dedicated satellite missions, i.e., the Sentinels spanning a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum with different sensing techniques. Sentinel-1 is the radar imaging component of Copernicus. It is a two-satellite constellation placed in the same orbit and spaced 180° apart. The all-weather, day-and-night images of Earth’s surface are systematically provided by Sentinel-1 to the Copernicus service component and to scientific users. The Sentinel-1 SAR data are suitable for interferometric and radiometric applications, whose performance depends on the thermal noise level in the data. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the activities spanning 10 years, focused on properly measuring, characterizing, and removing the thermal noise from S-1 data.