Three years of operations of the Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-3-OLCI PAC at German Aerospace Center

Kurzfassung

Copernicus is the European Earth Observation Programme, conducted jointly by the EC, ESA, EUMETSAT and the member states. The Sentinel satellites constitute the Copernicus space segment. Since 2014 already six Sentinel satellites have been launched successfully. The core payload data ground segment (PDGS) for the Sentinel satellites is managed by ESA and operated by national partners. In this core PDGS, DLR has been selected to install and operate Processing and Archiving Centers (PACs) for Sentinel-1 and the data from the Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) aboard Sentinel-3. This paper describes the results of the first three years of operations of the S1- and S3-OLCI-PAC at DLR. Daily, around 950 products are being processed based on sensor data from the OLCI instrument on Sentinel-3A, over 330 GB of associated data are stored in the Long-Term Archive of the DLR-PAC. The Sentinel-1A and Sentinel-1B satellites are already supplying many times that amount. Over 10,000 GB (10 TB) and more than 4700 products from the satellite pair are handled every day. In the first three years of operations the DLR-PAC has already processed and archived over 3.8 million data sets. They represent a data volume exceeding 6500 terabytes (6.3 petabytes).