Sentinel-1 for monitoring reservoirs: A performance analysis

Abstract

In this paper we explore the performances and the opportunities provided by the European satellite Sentinel-1 for water resource management applications in low-income countries. The analysis is supported by a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulator, which allowed the quantification of the expected characteristics of Sentinel-1 products in three applications: interferometric digital elevation models (DEMs) generation, land cover mapping and estimation of water volumes retained by small reservoirs. The obtained results quantitatively show that Sentinel-1 data characteristics are fully suitable for most of the application already explored in the recent SAR literature.