LiveEO has released the historical archive of Sentinel-1 data from 2014 to present from the Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) DAAC as unzipped files to Open Data on AWS. This drastically improves the efficiency and processing of this data. As a next stage, all of Europe will be added in the coming months. Eventually, the dataset will provide global, granular, up-to-date coverage of sentinel-1 data.

The Sentinel1 Single Look Complex (SLC) unzipped dataset contains Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 mission. Different from the zipped data provided by ESA, this dataset allows direct access to individual swaths required for a given study area, thus drastically minimizing the storage and downloading time requirements of a project.

Since the data is stored on S3, users can utilize the boto3 library and s3 get_object method to read the entire content of the object into the memory for processing, without actually having to download it. The Sentinel-1 constellation consists of two satellites equipped with SAR sensors and a combined revisit time of six days.

SAR imagery gets recorded regardless of weather conditions and daylight, which makes it ideally suited for monitoring land-use changes, surface deformations, land applications, oil spills, sea-ice, natural hazards, and for emergency response. In its current first stage, the dataset covers the entirety of Germany and is being updated continuously.

See here for the official announcement on the AWS Public Sector Blog.