Sentinel-1 SAR SAFE Raster Reader

Licensing options for this format begin with FME Desktop Professional Edition.

The Sentinel-1 SAR SAFE Raster reader provides FME with access to data in the Sentinel-1 SAR SAFE format.

Overview

The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 is a system of two satellites carrying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) equipment designed to monitor land surfaces, land surface motion, oceans, and sea ice.

Sentinel-1 SAR SAFE Level-1 products are comprised of a folder structure containing a manifest file as well as subfolders for annotation, measurement, preview, and support data. The measurement folder holds GeoTIFF files containing radar data. Each GeoTIFF file contains the raster data for a given polarization and swath.

Level-0 (unprocessed RAW/DAT) and Level-2 (NetCDF) products are not supported.

Ground Range Detected (GRD) products contain GeoTIFFs with a single UInt16 band.

Single-Look Complex (SLC) products contain GeoTIFFs with a single CInt16 band. SLC products are currently not supported because each image is a different size and represents a slightly offset area of the Earth from the other images, which, after reading, would give a single raster with different-sized bands.

OCN (Ocean) products are only available as Level-2 products and are not supported.

The reader supports Ground Control Points (GCPs) in the GeoTIFF files.

Sentinel-1 products can be downloaded from the Sentinels Scientific Data Hub.

Reader Overview

For each SENTINEL1 dataset, there is only a single feature returned, since this feature will contain the entire raster. It may contain several bands, depending on the type of capture.

FME considers a single SENTINEL1 product folder (with the file extension .SAFE) to be a dataset. The manifest.safe file in this folder is processed by the reader.

FME Raster Features

FME raster features represent raster data and use several concepts that are unlike those used in the handling of vector data. The topics below describe how FME processes raster data.

About FME Rasters Tiling and Mosaicking
Raster Properties Band Combining and Separating
Band Properties Band and Palette Selection
Palette Properties Raster Processing
Compression Raster versus Vector Features
Pyramiding Raster File Naming
Interleaving World Files
Interpretation and Data Type TAB Files
Palette Resolution