SAR Processing for Flood Mapping

The complete Sentinel-1 GRD pipeline, including three production bugs that fail silently

SAR Processing for Flood Mapping
Intermediate Remote Sensing 5 lessons Samuel Appiah Kubi

About this course

SAR flood mapping is one of the highest-value applications of free satellite data in West Africa, precisely because floods happen during storms — exactly when optical imagery is cloud-blocked. This course builds the full 9-step preprocessing pipeline from scratch, explains the physics behind why water looks the way it does in radar, and — critically — walks through three bugs that produce confidently wrong output with no error message, discovered the hard way during real flood-response work over Accra.

What you'll learn

  • Choose correctly between GRD and SLC Sentinel-1 products for a given task
  • Explain the physics of why smooth water looks dark in SAR imagery
  • Run the 9-step SAR preprocessing pipeline (S0–S9) in the correct order
  • Apply dual-threshold flood detection on VH polarisation
  • Detect and repair the three silent SAR production bugs before they reach a report

Requirements

  • Satellite Data Acquisition with pygeofetch
  • Basic Python and NumPy

Course content

GRD vs SLC: Choosing the Right Product for the Job Preview 18 min
The Physics: Why Smooth Water Looks Dark in Radar 20 min

The 9-Step SAR Pipeline (S0–S9), and Why Order Matters 28 min
The Three Silent Production Bugs — Learn Them Before You Hit Them 24 min
Flood Detection: the Dual-Threshold Approach 30 min
Free
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  • LevelIntermediate
  • Lessons5
  • CertificateYes
  • AccessLifetime

Samuel Appiah Kubi Instructor