New views from Sentinel-1A

Produced on 19 August 2014, this is one of the first 'interferograms' generated using radar images from Sentinel-1A. The interferogram combines images acquired on 7 and 19 August in 'Interferometric Wide Swath' mode. It covers an area of 250 x 340 km with two seamless radar acquisitions and shows Italy’s Gulf of Genoa towards the top, the Po River Valley in the top right, the island of Elba lower centre and the tip of France’s island of Corsica in the lower left corner. Although Sentinel-1A is still being commissioned, this new result demonstrates how useful it will be to map the shape of the land and monitor ground movement. Synthetic aperture radar interferometry – or InSAR – is a technique where two or more satellite radar images acquired over the same area are combined to map surface topography and detect surface change.