NovaSAR-1 CEOS-ARD products available
CSIRO operates Australia’s share of the NovaSAR-1 satellite as a National Facility for research, with registered users able to access the CSIRO NovaSAR-1 National Facility Datahub and submit new tasking requests at any time. The NovaSAR-1 National Facility enables new remote sensing research, supports satellite tasking and operations training, and enhances the development of Australia’s Earth observation and analytics expertise.
CSIRO has well-recognised expertise and capabilities in using satellite-derived data to monitor and manage our environment, including expertise in acquiring, storing, processing and analysing these rapidly growing data sets. However, we recognise that many users and potential users, do not have the same experience or access to the sometimes expensive software to do the same.
Working closely with the international Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (inter-Agency organisation) and its Analysis Ready Data SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) team, under the CEOS Virtual Constellation for Land Surface Imaging (LSI-VC) framework, CSIRO has developed the workflows for generating CEOS-ARD v5.5 NRB compliant NovaSAR-1 ARD products.
A sample of NovaSAR-1 ARD processing for Acquisition 39919 is shown as follows: HH Source in radar geometry (left), HH Beta0 (middle) and HH Gamma0-RTC (right) in map projection.
All the archive data covering Australia has been processed meeting the CEOS-ARD standard and is now available to download from the CSIRO NovaSAR-1 National Facility Datahub. All future images over Australia will be processed to ARD as standard.
In October 2023 the NovaSAR-1 Normalised Radar Backscatter (NRB) products were evaluated as CEOS-ARD compliant at the Threshold level.
CEOS-ARD self-assessment of 14 SAR products
CEOS Analysis Ready Data (CEOS-ARD) are ‘satellite data that have been processed to a minimum set of requirements and organised into a form that allows immediate analysis with a minimum of additional user effort and interoperability both through time and with other datasets’.
Steps taken for producing NovaSAR-1 ARD products compliant to CEOS-ARD V5.5 included:
- completed the NovaSAR-1 geometric accuracy assessments
- identified and finalised entries for the NovaSAR-1 ARD general metadata parameters
- refined the CEOS-ARD compliant NovaSAR-1 NRB product naming convention and file structure
- finalising the processing workflows of CEOS-ARD compliant NovaSAR-1 NRB production
- generation of per-pixel metadata images
- creation of the general metadata file in both xml and yaml formats
- ensuring that all the NovaSAR-1 ARD specifications are compliant with the CEOS-ARD Normalised Radar Backscatter (NRB) PFS version 5.5 requirements
- generating the NovaSAR-1 ARD products for all archive NovaSAR-1 imagery acquired in the Australian region by CSIRO
Notes:
- CEOS-ARD was previously named CEOS Analysis Ready Data for Land (CARD4L) which may still be used in some documentation
- ARD data is currently only available over Australia and in the 14 modes defined in the documentation (if you would like to request ARD generation over other areas, please get in touch with us)
- For more information see the full paper NovaSAR-1 Operational Updates and its Analysis Ready Data Production from the 2023 IEEE International Radar Conference (RADAR)