Monitoring changing ice with Sentinel-1

Carrying an advanced radar, Sentinel-1 can image Earth’s surface no matter what the weather and regardless of whether it is day or night. This makes it an ideal mission for monitoring the polar regions, which are shrouded in darkness for months at a time. While the mission offers timely information for a multitude of operational applications, it continues more than 20 years of radar imagery. This archive is not only essential for practical applications that need long time series of data, but also for understanding the long-term impacts of climate change, such as those on Arctic sea-ice cover, continental ice sheets and glaciers.