Preparation of analysis ready polsar data for the Australian Geoscience Data Cube

This paper describes a CSIRO investigation into the potential use of Sentinel-1 (S1) radar data with the Australian Geosciences Data Cube (AGDC) and in particular the necessity of polarimetric analysis of S1 dual-polarization data within AGDC. As a collaboration between Geoscience Australia, CSIRO and the National Computational Infrastructure, the AGDC provides a new collaborative information technology environment which combines an image database, high performance computing resources, software Application Programming Interfaces (API) to popular analysis tools and libraries, as well as an environment for custom algorithm development. It was created with the view to analysing the increasingly vast quantities of satellite imagery and other Earth observations. With the increasing availability of Earth observation data, especially freely accessed, globally covered and frequently revisited Copernicus Program data, the AGDC provides a potential resource for the analysis and processing of these data, especially where joint analysis with other archives is required. Here we investigate the preparation and necessity of including Sentinal-1 dual-pol SAR data polarimetric processing for the purpose of ingestion into the AGDC.