A Global C-Band RFI Monitoring System Based on Sentinel-1 Data

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a well-known issue since the early days of telecommunications. Traditionally considered an occasional event in the Earth Observation domain, RFI is becoming a severe problem due to the surge of wireless LANs and the increasing number of operational EO missions. In the near future, RFI will eventually be treated as an additional source of noise, to be addressed not only for mitigation, but also during mission design. Sentinel-1 (S-1) is a constellation of two spaceborne C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors developed and operated by the European Space Agency under the Copernicus programme. In this paper, S-1 thermal noise measurements are used to create an automatic monitoring system generating world RFI maps with a periodicity of 12 days. For tuning the system, the RFI power is calibrated against a radiometer operating at the same range of frequencies. Analysing the strength and geographical distribution of the RFI, the most affected regions are identified and probability maps are extracted.