Deformation monitoring with Sentinel-1 Wave mode data

TL;DR

This paper presents a new approach for processing Sentinel-1 Wave mode data that simplifies large-scale deformation monitoring by enabling vignette-based access, improving efficiency over traditional SLC data handling.

Contribution

It introduces a vignette-based data access method for Sentinel-1 WV mode, facilitating large-scale deformation monitoring and overcoming limitations of existing data packaging and metadata conventions.

Findings

Efficient generation of coregistered, geocoded stacks within minutes.

Large volume of WV mode data available for land and ocean monitoring.

Demonstrated applicability for deformation monitoring applications.

Abstract

We describe the salient characteristics of Sentinel-1 wave (WV) mode vignettes. We describe our approach for working with WV mode data that enables vignette-based data access and processing, thereby eliminating the Sentinel-1 Single Look Complex (SLC) data packaging and current archive metadata conventions as a bottleneck to large scale processing. We discuss the spatial and temporal coverage of Sentinel-1 WV mode data and show that a large volume of data has been acquired over land masses in this mode, thus allowing us to use it for land monitoring applications as well as ocean applications. For targeted infrastructure monitoring studies, we are able to generate coregistered, geocoded stacks of WV mode SLCs for any area of interest (AOI) with sufficient wave mode coverage, in a few minutes. We demonstrate the applicability of using WV mode data for deformation monitoring applications. Finally, we discuss the benefits and limitations of working with Sentinel-1 WV mode data.