Pre-processing of Sentinel 1

This project aims to connect Sentinel 1 with the Open Data Cube.

It takes Synthetic Aperture Radar data (specifically GRD scenes from the Sentinel 1 platform) and prepares it for ingestion into an opendatacube instance (such as Digital Earth Australia), using the Sentinel Toolbox (SNAP) software.

NOTE: in-progress, use at own risk.

Processing steps

Prerequisites:

• Sentinel 1 GRD (ground-range, detected amplitude) scenes.
• Precise orbital ephemeris metadata. (Possibly also calibration?)
• A digital model for the elevations of the scattering surface (DSM/DEM).
• gpt (graph processing tool) from the Sentinel Toolbox software.
• Access to a configured ODC instance.

Stages:

1. Update metadata (i.e. orbit vectors)
2. Trim border noise (an artifact of the S1 GRD products)
3. Calibrate (radiometric, outputting beta-nought)
4. Flatten (radiometric terrain correction)
5. Range-Doppler (geometric terrain correction)
6. Format for the AGDC (e.g. export metadata, tile and index)

Implementation

Initially will use auto-downloaded auxilliary data (ephemeris, DEM). Later, intend to use GDAL tools to subset a DSM, or test efficiency of chunked file-formats for the DSM raster.

Steps 1-4 will be combined in a gpt xml.

Step 5 will be a gpt command-line instruction. (Some operators chain together inefficiently, at least in previous gpt versions.)

Step 6 will be a python prep script.

The overall orchestration will initially be a shell script. (Other options would be a Makefile or a python cluster scheduling script.)

A jupyter notebook will demonstrate the result (using opendatacube API).

Known flaws

• Ocean is masked out. (This is due to the nodata value used for the DEM by the terrain correction steps.)
• Border noise is not entirely eliminated (some perimeter pixels).
• Could conceive a more efficient unified radiometric/geometric terrain-correction operator (to reduce file IO concerning DSM)?
• Further comparison with GAMMA software output is necessary.
• Signal intensity units unspecified.
• Currently autodownloading ancilliary data (e.g. using 3s SRTM, which is suboptimal).
• Output format is ENVI raster (approximately 10x larger than input zip) rather than cloud optimised GeoTIFF.

Instructions

Process imagery

1. Ensure the graph processing tool is available (run "ln -s ../snap6/bin/gpt gpt" after installing SNAP)
2. Batch process some scenes (run "./bulk.sh example_list.txt" after confirming example input)

(Takes 10-15min/scene, using 4 cores and 10-15GB memory, on VDI@NCI.)

Insert into Open Data Cube

3. Ensure the environment has been prepared (run "datacube system check")
4. Define the products (run "datacube product add productdef.yaml")
5. For each newly preprocessed scene, run a preparation script (e.g. "python prep.py output1.dim") to generate metadata (yaml) in an appropriate format for datacube indexing.
6. For each of those prepared scenes, index into the datacube (e.g. "datacube dataset add output*.yaml --auto-match")
7. Verify the data using the datacube API (e.g. a python notebook).