Improved Sentinel-1 IW Burst Stitching through Geolocation Error Correction Considerations

Since the commissioning phase of Sentinel-1A, several calibration studies have improved the geolocation and geometric modeling of the data. The implementation of the corrections presented in these studies is left to the user. The issues found might be confusing when working with bursts in the interferometric wide swath mode, because the geometric shifts present in the data are not usually the same at the burst boundaries. This might introduce small inconsistencies in a mosaic product if not properly handled, which is especially inconvenient in high precision applications. This paper proposes a method to account for this effect by resampling the bursts before stitching. The method is validated with experiments on real Sentinel-1 data.