An official website of the United States government
The daily composite of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Normalized Radar Cross Section (NRCS) imagery covering the Arctic and sub-Arctic maritime regions over a period of one day are available at 1-km resolution. These high-resolution, weather- and time-agnostic measurements of surface backscatter contain detailed information tailored for sea ice classification purposes.
Data Access
| Data Tool Links | ||
| Sample Filenames | Source filenames begin with satellite, data source, year, month, day, hour, minute, second, Julian seconds, center latitude, center longitude, polarization, delimited with an underscore NRCS: S1A_ESA_2016_12_07_18_18_57_0534449937_178.66E_51.85N_VV_C5_GFS05 CDF_nrcs_level2.[png,nc] CoastWatch distributed composites: SAR_composite_2022070T0000_2022070T2359_NP06_1km_nrcs.[png,nc] |
|
| HTTPS | https://coastwatch.noaa.gov/data/pub0022/coastwatch/composite/nrcs/arctic/ |
|
| THREDDS | https://coastwatch.noaa.gov/thredds/socd/coastwatch/catalog_composite_sar_nrcs_arctic_daily.html |
|
| ERDDAP |
|
Product Overview
The daily composite of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Normalized Radar Cross Section (NRCS) imagery covering the Arctic and sub-Arctic maritime regions over a period of one day are available at 1-km resolution. These high-resolution, weather- and time-agnostic measurements of surface backscatter contain detailed information tailored for sea ice classification purposes.
A composite for typical day contains around 200-400 individual scenes gathered from several C-Band SAR systems, including Sentinel-1A/B, RADARSAT-2, and RADARSAT Constellation Mission, which are calibrated with values given by the SAR data provider and are then projected and resampled onto a 1km polar stereographic grid. The files are produced in SAROPS (SAR Operational Product System) by the Water Surface Conditions/Sea Surface Roughness group within the NOAA STAR Satellite Oceanography and Climatology Division.
For further details on the individual granules that make these composites and for links to the GeoTIFF versions of these files, please see the SAR NRCS page.
Data Courtesy of the Copernicus Program, RADARSAT Constellation Mission, and the Canadian Space Agency.
Product Details
00:00Z-23:59Z (daily)
Generated at 14Z the following day
1km
Documentation
Synthetic Aperture Radar Marine Users Manual. Ed C.R Jackson and J.R. Apel: NOAA: Washington, DC, USA, 2004. ISBN 0-16-073214-X
