Proceedings

Sentinel-1 GRD Preprocessing Workflow †

Federico Filipponi
Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale, 48 - 00144 Roma, Italy;
federico.filipponi@isprambiente.it; Tel.: +39-06-5007-2438
† Presented at the 3rd International Electronic Conference on Remote Sensing, 22 May–5 June 2019; Available
Online: https://sciforum.net/conference/ecrs-3

Published: 4 June 2019

Abstract: The Copernicus Programme has become the world’s largest space data provider,
providing complete, free and open access to satellite data, mainly acquired by Sentinel satellites.
Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data have improved spatial resolution and high revisit
frequency, making them useful for a wide range of applications. While few research applications
need Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) data with few corrections applied, a wider range of
users needs products with a standard set of corrections applied. In order to facilitate the
exploitation of Sentinel-1 GRD products, there is the need to standardise procedures to preprocess
SAR data to a higher processing level. A standard generic workflow to preprocess Copernicus
Sentinel-1 GRD data is presented here. The workflow aims to apply a series of standard corrections,
and to apply a precise orbit of acquisition, remove thermal and image border noise, perform
radiometric calibration, and apply range Doppler and terrain correction. Additionally, the
workflow allows spatially snapping of Sentinel-1 GRD products to Sentinel-2 MSI data grids, in
order to promote the use of satellite virtual constellations by means of data fusion techniques. The
presented workflow allows the production of a set of preprocessed Sentinel-1 GRD data, offering a
benchmark for the development of new products and operational down-streaming services based
on consistent Copernicus Sentinel-1 GRD datasets, with the aim of providing reliable information
of interest to a wide range of communities.

Keywords: Sentinel-1; Synthetic Aperture Radar; Ground Range Detected; GRD; preprocessing;
radiometric calibration; terrain correction

1. Introduction
The establishment of the Copernicus Programme by the European Commission created a new
paradigm in the availability and accessibility of data information, offering services based on Earth
observation satellites and in situ data under six thematic Copernicus services. The Copernicus
Programme has become the world’s largest space data provider, providing complete, free and open
access to satellite data, mainly acquired by Sentinel satellites. The main advantages offered by
Sentinel data are the improved spatial resolution and high revisit frequency, making them useful for
a wide range of applications.
The Sentinel-1 mission is a constellation of two polar-orbiting satellites (Sentinel-1A and
Sentinel-1B), which operate day and night, sensing with a C-band synthetic aperture radar
instrument operating at a centre frequency of 5.405 GHz, allowing the acquisition of imagery
regardless of weather and illumination conditions. Sentinel-1 satellite constellations acquire
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in single or dual polarization with a revisit time of 6 days.
Sentinel-1 Level 1 data are distributed by the Copernicus Open Access Hub under two product
types: Ground Range Detected (GRD) and Single Look Complex (SLC).
Sentinel-1 level-1 GRD products consist of focused SAR data that have been detected,
multi-looked and projected to ground range using an Earth ellipsoid model. The ellipsoid projection
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of the GRD products is corrected using the terrain height, specified in the product general
annotation, that varies in azimuth but is constant in range. After performing a multi-looking
separately for each burst, a ground range detected image is generated merging all bursts in all
sub-swaths. The Sentinel-1 GRD scene is composed of square pixels with reduced speckle, due to the
multi-look processing, representing only the detected amplitude (the phase information is
discarded).

2. Workflow
A standard generic workflow to preprocess Copernicus Sentinel-1 GRD data is presented here.
The workflow was created in order to be used within the Sentinel application platform (SNAP), a
common architecture for all Sentinel satellite toolboxes. The processing graph in 'xml' format allows
the processing of Sentinel-1 GRD using the command line graph processing framework, which
allows for batch processing of large datasets.
The preprocessing workflow consists of seven processing steps, designed to best reduce error
propagation in subsequent processes, described hereafter in separate subsections. The code to
perform the preprocessing workflow is available on the GitHub repository [1] and in the
Supplementary Materials as Computer Code 1.

2.1. Apply Orbit File

Orbit state vectors, contained within the metadata information of SAR products, are generally
not accurate. The precise orbits of satellites are determined after several days and are available
days-to-weeks after the generation of the product. The operation of applying a precise orbit available
in SNAP allows the automatic download and update of the orbit state vectors for each SAR scene in
its product metadata, providing an accurate satellite position and velocity information.

2.2. Thermal Noise Removal

Sentinel-1 image intensity is disturbed by additive thermal noise, particularly in the
cross-polarization channel [2]. Thermal noise removal reduces noise effects in the inter-sub-swath
texture, in particular, normalizing the backscatter signal within the entire Sentinel-1 scene and
resulting in reduced discontinuities between sub-swaths for scenes in multi-swath acquisition
modes. The thermal noise removal operator available in SNAP for Sentinel-1 data can also
re-introduce the noise signal that could have been removed during level-1 product generation, and
update product annotations to allow for re-application of the correction [3]. Sentinel-1 level-1
products provide a noise look-up table (LUT), provided in linear power, for each measurement data
set and used to derive calibrated noise profiles matching the calibrated GRD data [3].

2.3. Border Noise Removal

While generating level-1 products, it is necessary to correct the sampling start time in order to
compensate for the change of the Earth’s curvature. At the same time, azimuth and range
compression leads to radiometric artefacts at the image borders. The border noise removal algorithm [4],
available as an operator in SNAP, was designed in order to remove low intensity noise and invalid
data on scene edges.

2.4. Calibration
Calibration is the procedure that converts digital pixel values to radiometrically calibrated SAR
backscatter. The information required to apply the calibration equation is included within the
Sentinel-1 GRD product; specifically, a calibration vector included as an annotation in the product
allows simple conversion of image intensity values into sigma nought values. The calibration
reverses the scaling factor applied during level-1 product generation, and applies a constant offset
and a range-dependent gain, including the absolute calibration constant.
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In the proposed preprocessing workflow, a LUT to produce sigma nought values is proposed,
in order to generate radiometrically calibrated SAR backscatter with respect to the nominally
horizontal plane. Sigma specifies the strength of reflection in terms of the geometric cross section of a
conducting sphere, and represents the radar cross section of a distributed target over that expected
from an area of one square meter. The sigma nought has a significant variation with the incidence
angle, wavelength, and polarisation, as well as with properties of the scattering surface.

Figure 1. Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected (GRD) preprocessing workflow.

2.5. Speckle Filtering

Speckle, appearing in SAR images as granular noise, is due to the interference of waves
reflected from many elementary scatterers [5]. Speckle filtering is a procedure to increase image
quality by reducing speckle. When such a procedure is done at an early processing stage of SAR
data, speckle is not propagated in ongoing processes (i.e., terrain correction or conversion to dB).
Speckle filtering is not advisable when there is an interest in the identification of small spatial
structures or image texture, since it might remove such information. The refined Lee filter has been
found to be superior, with respect to other single product speckle filters, for visual interpretation,
because of its ability to preserve edges, linear features, and point target and texture information [5].
More recently, multitemporal speckle filters have been developed to reduce speckle, taking
advantages from multiple SAR observations in time. The proposed preprocessing workflow
includes a speckle filtering step, which could be skipped by selecting 'None' as the filter type.
Currently, one of the following filters is available in the SNAP single product speckle filter operator:
'Boxcar', 'Median', 'Frost', 'Gamma Map', 'Lee', 'Refined Lee', 'Lee Sigma', 'IDAN'.

2.6. Range Doppler Terrain Correction

SAR data are generally sensed with a varying viewing angle greater than 0 degrees, resulting in
images with some distortion related to side-looking geometry. Terrain corrections are intended to
compensate for these distortions so that the geometric representation of the image will be as close as
possible to the real world. Range Doppler terrain correction is a correction of geometric distortions
caused by topography, such as foreshortening and shadows, using a digital elevation model to
correct the location of each pixel. The range Doppler terrain correction operator available in SNAP
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implements the Range Doppler orthorectification method [6] for geocoding SAR scenes from images
in radar geometry. It makes use of available orbit state vector information in the metadata, the radar
timing annotations, and the slant to ground range conversion parameters together with the reference
digital elevation model data to derive the precise geolocation information [3]. The target Coordinate
Reference System (CRS) can be selected and optionally set to match the UTM zone of the overlaying
Sentinel-2 granules. The operator allows the selection of the image resampling method and the
target pixel spacing in the target CRS. This processing step allows the spatial snapping of Sentinel-1
GRD products to Sentinel-2 MSI data grids, in order to geolocate data to a common spatial grid and
promote the use of satellite virtual constellations.

2.7. Conversion to dB
As a last step of the preprocessing workflow, the unitless backscatter coefficient is converted to
dB using a logarithmic transformation.

3. Conclusions
A standard generic workflow to preprocess Copernicus Sentinel-1 GRD data was presented.
The workflow aims to produce a set of preprocessed Sentinel-1 GRD data, offering a benchmark for
the development of new products and operational down-streaming services based on consistent
Copernicus Sentinel-1 GRD data.
The workflow applies a series of standard corrections, and to apply a precise orbit of
acquisition, remove thermal and image border noise, perform radiometric calibration, and apply
range Doppler and terrain correction. Additionally, Sentinel-1 GRD products can be spatially
coregistered to Sentinel-2 MSI data grids, in order to promote the use of satellite virtual
constellations by means of data fusion techniques.
Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/18/1/11/s1.

Acknowledgments: This work contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019). The author is grateful to the
many individuals working on the development of free and free open-source SNAP software for supporting the
sharing of knowledge.

Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.

References
1. github.com, Ffilipponi Repository—Sentinel-1_GRD_Preprocessing: Standard Workflow for the
Preprocessing of Sentinel-1 GRD Satellite Data. Available online:
https://github.com/ffilipponi/Sentinel-1_GRD_preprocessing (accessed on 21 May 2019).
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sea ice applications. In the Proceedings of the EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts, Vienna,
Austria, 23–28 April 2017; Volume 19, p. 12613.
3. SNAP Software, Help Document 2019. Available online: https://step.esa.int/main/toolboxes/snap
(accessed on 1 May 2018).
4. Guillaume, H. Masking “No-value” Pixels on GRD Products generated by the Sentinel-1 ESA IPF. ESA
Tech. Rep, 2015. Reference MPC-0243, Issue 1.0.
5. Lee, J.S.; Jurkevich, L.; Dewaele, P.; Wambacq, P.; Oosterlinck, A. Speckle filtering of synthetic aperture
radar images: A review. Remote Sens. Rev. 1994, 8, 313-340.
6. Small, D.; Schubert, A. Guide to ASAR Geocoding. ESA-ESRIN Technical Note RSL-ASAR-GC-AD,
University of Zurich: Zurich, Switzerland, 2008; Volume 1, p. 36.

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(CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).