On the Effective Usage of Sentinel-1 Noise Pulses for Denoising and RFI Identification

The all-weather, day-and-night supply of imagery of Earth's surface provided by Sentinel-1 is suitable for interferometric and radiometric applications. The latter, exploiting SAR images intensity to derive geophysical parameters, require that the thermal noise level is subtracted from the acquired data. To estimate the noise level dedicated pulses are acquired in each Sentinel-1 data take. The paper presents the results of the analysis of the noise pulses, which led to the definition of a new denoising strategy for Sentinel-1 products and to a new opportunity application for Sentinel-1 as a passive radiometer to monitor C-band Radio Frequency Interferences.