Annual local resolution weighted composites of Sentinel-1 coherence and backscatter over Swiss glaciers
- 🗺️ Interactive web map
- 💾 Dataset on Source Cooperative (you are here)
- 🧭 Portolan browser of the STAC catalog
- ⚙️ Production pipeline on GitHub (coming soon)
- 🏷️ Dataset metadata on GitHub
This is a preliminary release over the Swiss Alps, published to exercise the GLACE publication pipeline while the full dataset is produced. The dataset is GLACE Alps, over the Alpine Convention perimeter, which uses this same pipeline and supersedes this catalog. These URLs are provisional: do not cite them, and expect the coverage, the years and the identifiers to change.
Annual summer composites of Sentinel-1 12-day repeat-pass interferometric
coherence (COH12) and radiometrically terrain-corrected backscatter (RTC) over
the Alpine Convention perimeter, 2021–2024, as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs with a
STAC catalog over them. Agents: read AGENTS.md.
Collections
Both cover the same pixels. The tiles hold the main product for scientific analysis. The mosaics serve as overviews on one equal-area grid, where every year shares the same extent, so the series stacks and differences without alignment. The mosaics also carry the web-map product: one PMTiles archive per layer and year, drawn by the GLACE Viewer.
Data access
All files are anonymous-read on Source Cooperative, with no API key required,
over HTTPS (https://data.source.coop/lqgentner/glace-ch/) or S3
(s3://eu-central-1.opendata.source.coop/lqgentner/glace-ch/). Every collection publishes its items as one
STAC-GeoParquet file, items.parquet, which is the query path: one range
request instead of one HTTP fetch per item.
Search the catalog. rustac searches the item mirror directly:
Plot a mosaic. Read a decimated overview rather than the full raster:
Build a data cube. Find the tiles in an area of interest and load them with odc-stac; every year becomes one time step:
Open the tiles in QGIS. Build a virtual raster of one year and product to stream the COGs:
Tiles from different UTM zones need one VRT per zone; the item mirror's
proj:code column says which.
About the dataset
Sentinel-1 SLC bursts are processed to 12-day repeat-pass coherence and terrain-corrected gamma-nought backscatter, then composited over each year's 90-day summer window with local resolution weighting after Small et al. (2022): each acquisition contributes in proportion to how well it resolves the pixel, so layover and shadow are down-weighted rather than averaged in. Every measurement carries two QA layers, the number of contributing observations and the composite quality map, which is the weighting's own record of how well each pixel was resolved.
Stored values are linear throughout; use 10*log10(x) to convert to
decibels. Every raster carries its description and processing record in its
GeoTIFF tags.
License
CC-BY-4.0. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data.
Cite
A citation will be added with the preprint. Until then, cite the repository release at lqgentner/glace-catalog.
Comments and contributions
The metadata of this catalog lives on GitHub. Issue reports are welcome there.