Sentinel-1 RTC via ASF - OPERA

[kongstad_dk]

Hello,

I just recently learned that I can obtain worldwide processed S1 RTC data via Alaska Satellite Facility. To put it mildly I am very excited about this and I am currently investigating if we can deploy it in our pipelines rather than doing all the SNAP processing server side. Furthermore you guys also provide the LIA layers which Microsoft Planetary Computer is not doing on their S1 RTC product. So huge thumbs up for doing this!

Now to my first question. The data appear to only be near-globally available from October 2023 (Listed here: https://asf.alaska.edu/datasets/daac/opera/ under products). Is that a hard limit or do you aim to reprocess old data to bring more years of data into the dataset? Whilst 2023 october and onwards is great, it means I will only be able to use this going forward and not train models based on previous data conditioned in this specific way. I'd just like to know where you stand on this.

EDIT: After I posted this, the below question was answered on email by ASF user support and the link to the product documentation has been fixed!
As a second question, on the same website as I just linked, there is a User guides and technical documentation page. For the "RTC-S1-STATIC Product Specification Document" it seems to be linking to the CSLC product instead. Am I missing something here?

Thank you for your time, and sorry if this has already been asked. I've looked around but could not locate anything.

[ASF - bhauer]

Hello Peter,
ASF does not process OPERA products but is the distributor for the products created by the OPERA team at JPL. They do not plan on back-processing RTC products like they plan on doing with the CSLC products.

If you've incorporated SNAP into your RTC processing workflow, you might take a look at ASF HyP3 as an alternative. This is a free, on-demand cloud-processing service offered by ASF, available through Vertex and programmatically through an API or SDK. Information on the service is available in the HyP3 user guide: https://hyp3-docs.asf.alaska.edu/

If you're interested in pursuing this further, please let us know.

Thank you,
Bill Hauer

[kongstad_dk]

Thank you for the insight @bhauer and thank you for the quick reply via Email regarding the S1 RTC Static documentation.

I have looked into the HyP3 API and done some testing. However, I am afraid the limit of 1.000 tasks/tiles per month is too little for our needs and the processing time of a tile with a upscaled 10 m resolution is now running for more than 2 hours and havent yet finished.
Whilst the service is excellent, we are looking for already processed and easy to stream RTC content. OPERA does have this, but its data extent back in time is simply to short to currently be of use to us. This may change in the future though!

Thank you for your time and help.