Development of a Global Backscatter Model in support to the Sentinel-1 mission design

The high data throughput of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instruments introduces stringent requirements on the end-to-end system, from the on-board storage capacity and data downlink to processing power and archiving capacity in the ground segment. An efficient raw data compression scheme on-board the satellite is therefore required to maximise the return on investment for SAR missions. The next generation of European SAR satellites, the Sentinel-1 mission, will employ the Flexible Dynamic Block Adaptive Quantization (FDBAQ) compression scheme. In order to validate the implementation of the FDBAQ, expected radar reflectivity levels for the global land surface were needed.