Using the Copernicus ...

The European Space Agency (ESA) have developed a series of toolboxes for working with data from the Sentinel satellites. These can be downloaded from the Sentinel Toolbox Exploitation Platform (STEP). The toolboxes share a common architecture called the Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP).

SNAP builds on the legacy of the VISAT BEAM software developed for use with data from the ENVISAT satellite. Key functionalities of SNAP include:

• Image display and navigation

• Layer management to view and manipulate multiple product layers as well as images from WMS servers/ESRI shape files.

• Subsetting and exporting to different file formats including:

• Plots and statistics for defined regions of interest.

• Mask definition and display (pre or self defined)

• Band arithmetic (to apply mathematical expressions to products.

• Graph Processing Framework (GPF): for creating user-defined processing chains

• Supports numerous sensors beyond the Sentinels (Including MERIS, MODIS, Landsat8)

• Reprojection and ortho-rectification to a variety of map projections,

• Geo-coding and rectification using ground control point

• Multithreading and Multi-core processor support

This is the key piece of software we will use during this course. SeaDAS (developed by NASA) also has a similar graphical user interface to SNAP.

SNAP is available for Windows, Mac and UNIX systems. To download and install, first visit this page and select the download of the Sentinel Toolboxes suitable for your operating system.

Open the downloaded file and follow the installation instructions. You can opt to only install the toolboxes you want. For this course you will only need the Sentinel 3 toolbox, but you may wish to install all. If you wish to install other toolboxes after the initial installation you can follow the guidelines here to install from within SNAP.

Once installed, open the software by clicking on the icon in your relevant install location (e.g. in ‘All Programs’ in Windows, ‘Applications’ in Mac, or the equivalent dependent on your UNIX system. You can also open from the command line, information on the SNAP command line interfaces is here.

We recommend you update all the plugins once installed. You can do this from the top menu under Help>Check for updates. 

If you are not able to install this software please let us know by the end of the online component of the course.