Download Sentinel-1 Data
Lesson 1 of 1
Download Sentinel-1 Data
In this quick guide, you will:
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Set user credentials for a Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem or Alaska SAR Facility account. * •
Define acquisition time, image and orbital parameters, and geographic area search criteria. * •
Automatically download Sentinel-1 data that meet search criteria to your computer.
Sample Data
This quick guide does not have any sample data.
Before You Begin
Sentinel-1 data are freely available from two web sites. You must set up a user account with either site before following this quick guide.
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Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem(opens in a new tab) * •
Alaska SAR Facility - Vertex(opens in a new tab)
Set User Credentials in SAR Essentials Preferences
You can enter your user credentials in the SAR Download Sentinel-1 Data tool, but a preferred method is to enter them in the SAR Essentials Management dialog instead. The latter is where you set general SAR Essentials preferences. Setting them here prevents you from having to reenter credentials each time you run the SAR Download Sentinel-1 Data tool.
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Start ENVI. - 2
In the Toolbox, expand the SAR Essentials folder and double-click SAR Essentials Management. It is the last tool in the list. The SAR Essentials Management dialog appears with the Credentials tab active. - 3
If you have a Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem account, enter your credentials in the DataSpace Username and DataSpace Password fields.
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If you have an Alaska SAR Facility account, enter your credentials in the ASF Username and ASF Password fields. - 5
Click the Save & Close button.
Download Sentinel-1 Data
Before you can automatically download data, you should know what time period and geographic area you are interested in. If you do not know the bounding-box coordinates of your area of interest, you can use the geographic extent of an image displayed in ENVI as the basis for the search. For this exercise, we will manually enter geographic coordinates for an area located in the Red Sea in November of 2023.
The SAR Download Sentinel-1 tool will download all datasets that overlap your area of interest and time frame.
Set Input Data Search Criteria
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In the Toolbox, go to the SAR Essentials folder and double-click SAR Download Sentinel-1. The SAR Download Sentinel-1 dialog appears. The Input tab is active. - 2
Click the Download Service drop-down list and select DataSpace or ASF, depending on which service you have an account with. - 3
Click the drop-down lists in the From section and select the following options:
Day: 6
Month: November
Year: 2023
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Click the drop-down lists in the To section and select the following options:
Day: 8
Month: November
Year: 2023
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Keep the default selection of All for Orbit Direction. - 6
Click the Product Type drop-down list and select Single Look Complex. - 7
Click the Acquisition Mode drop-down list and select Interferometric Wide Swath. - 8
Click the Polarization Mode drop-down list and select VV+VH.
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Click the Area tab.
Set Geographic Search Criteria
The Area tab provides several options to define your geographic area of interest:
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Import a shapefile or Google Earth KML/KMZ file with at least four vertices that define an area of interest. Coordinates must be in a Geographic (GEO-GLOBAL) projection. * •
Manually define Geographic (GEO-GLOBAL) bounding-box coordinates. * •
Use the geographic extent of a specified image or the extents of the current view. In the latter case, an image or vector dataset must be displayed in ENVI. You can also refine your area of interest by drawing a bounding box within a displayed image.
All Sentinel-1 acquisitions inside or intersecting your specified area of interest will be returned. Thus, a larger area of interest will return more datasets. Knowing and specifying the relative orbit and/or the orbital direction can reduce the amount of data that is downloaded.
For this exercise, you will query a small area centered around the Hanish Islands in the Red Sea (shown in red below). This will return one Sentinel-1 dataset.
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Enter the following geographic coordinates in the Bounding Box fields. The values represent latitude and longitude:
North: 14.2
South: 13.3
West: 42.1
East: 43.3
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Click the Credentials tab.
Verify Credentials
The Credentials tab provides another opportunity to enter your Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem or ASF credentials. However, since you already entered them in the SAR Essentials Management dialog earlier, you do not need to repeat those steps here.
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Verify that your credentials are correct.
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Click the Export tab.
Set Export Options
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Click the Yes option for Wait for Completion. You won't be able to do anything else in ENVI, but the download process will only take a few minutes. If you specify a large geographic area and you anticipate many returned files, you can set this option to No so that you can continue to use ENVI in the mean time. - 2
Click the Yes option for Unzip Files. This will automatically extract the contents of the *SAFE.zip files that are downloaded to your computer. - 3
Files will download to the directory specified in the ENVI Output Directory preference. To verify the location, select File > Preferences from the ENVI Menu bar. Click the Directories item on the left side of the Preferences dialog. Then verify the Output Directory location.
To specify a different output folder for downloading Sentinel-1 files, click the Browse button next to Output Folder (in the SAR Download Sentinel-1 dialog) and choose a different folder.
Download Data
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Click the OK button in the SAR Download Sentinel-1 dialog. The dialog is dismissed, and the download process begins. A Sentinel-1 automatic Multidownload dialog appears, and a command window displays the processing status. You should see a "Found x unique frame(s)!" message like the one circled in red below:
The download process takes several minutes to complete. When it is finished, the command window issues a "Done" message.
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Press the Enter key on your keyboard to dismiss the command window. - 3
Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your output directory. - 4
Look for the "unzip_folder." Go into that folder and verify that the S1A_IW_SLC__1SDV_20231107T151938_20231107T152004_051113_062A09_4EFD.SAFE folder exists. SAR Essentials automatically extracted the contents of the original downloaded ZIP file and placed them in this directory.
Files and directories downloaded from ASF Vertex may be different than what is shown here.
Now you can use the Sentinel-1 dataset with any tool in SAR Essentials.
This concludes the quick guide.
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