COSMO-SkyMed Products

The COSMO-SkyMed products are divided in the following major classes:

  • Standard products
  • Higher level products

Standard products

The Standard products are the basic image products of the system. They are suitable for many remote sensing applications based on direct usage of low level products and they are subdivided into 4 typologies, coded as:

  • 1A, Single-look Complex Slant product: RAW data focused in slant range-azimuth projection, that is the sensor natural acquisition projection. The product contains In-Phase and Quadrature of the focused data, weighted and radiometrically equalized;

  • 1B, Detected Ground Multi-look product, obtained detecting, multi-looking and projecting the Single-look Complex Slant data onto a grid regular in ground. Note: Spotlight Mode products are not multilooked;

  • 1C/1D, Geocoded product GEC (1C level product) and GTC (1D level product), obtained projecting the 1A product onto a regular grid in a chosen cartographic reference system. In case of Lev 1C the surface is the earth ellipsoid, while for the Lev 1D a DEM (Digital Elevation Model) is used to approximate the real earth surface. In Lev 1D data is constituted by the Backscattering coefficient of the observed scene, multilooked (except for Spotlight Mode), including the annexed the Incidence Angles Mask.

Following is a short summary of the Standard Products:

  • Level O: RAW, Received SAR signal;
  • Level 1A: SCS, Single look, Complex, Slant range;
  • Level 1B: DGM, Detected, Ground project, Multilooked;
  • Level 1C: GEC, Geocoded Ellipsoid Corrected;
  • Level 1D: GTC, Geocoded Terrain Corrected.

 

Higher Level Products

The previous products types shall be considered as product classes rather than products types since each of the four modes in which the SAR instrument operates - namely Stripmap, Polarimetric, ScanSAR, Spotlight - originate the related 1A/B/C/D products.

The Higher Level Products, suited for mid or even high level remote sensing applications, are composed by the following products:

  • Co-registered products: a set of image layers co-registered together (i.e. merged in vertical direction), for interferometry, change detection and so on;
  • Mosaiked products: a set of images joined together (i.e. merged in horizontal direction), for large spatial coverage representation;
  • Speckle filtered products: an image with an increased equivalent number of looks (ENL);
  • Interferometric products (interferometric coherence and phase), supporting interferometric applications;
  • DEM products, Digital elevation data and related height error map obtained with interferometric techniques.

 

 

Further details are available in the COSMO-SkyMed SAR Products Handbook document.