JERS-1 SAR: 100-m Mosaics of South America, 1995-1996

Between September 1995 and July 1996, this dataset provides ~100-meter resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image mosaics of South America, specifically covering the Amazon River Basin during low and high flood seasons. It constitutes the first-ever high-resolution, single-season coverage of the entire basin, enabled by the cloud-penetrating properties of radar. The data are provided as 66 GeoTIFF files, mosaicked from approximately 50 JERS-1 scenes per tile into 34 tiles for each season.

Use Cases

• Monitoring seasonal flood extent in the Amazon Basin based on dual-season SAR imagery.
• Analyzing land surface changes between 1995 and 1996 using cloud-penetrating radar data.
• Creating baseline maps of wetlands and surface water features from high-resolution mosaics.
• Calibrating or validating hydrological models with historical flood season imagery.

Strengths

• Provides first-ever high-resolution, single-season SAR coverage of the entire Amazon River Basin.
• Contains dual-season imagery (low and high flood) from 1995-1996 for comparative analysis.
• Offers cloud-penetrating radar data at ~100-meter resolution, mosaicked from about 50 scenes per tile.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is low: specific column names, author, and exact file sizes are unknown.
• There is a conflict in reported last update dates: one source lists 2026-04-10, while another lists 1996-07-31.
• The dataset is historical, covering only a specific one-year period from 1995 to 1996.

Provenance

Source

Japanese Earth Resources Satellite 1 (JERS-1) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operated by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), part of the Global Rain Forest Mapping Project.

Collection Method

Satellite imagery acquired and mosaicked into GeoTIFF tiles by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Time Range

1995-09 to 1996-07

Freshness

2026-04-10 02:02:09.709089

Geography

South America, specifically the Amazon River Basin.