SNAP Toolbox

SNAP Toolbox, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), is the common architecture for processing data from all Sentinel satellite missions under the Copernicus programme. It provides a unified desktop application with specialized toolboxes for Sentinel-1 (SARSARSynthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is an active remote sensing technology that uses microwave radar pulses to create high...), Sentinel-2 (multispectral), and Sentinel-3 (ocean and land monitoring) data, as well as support for numerous other Earth observation sensor formats. SNAP includes a rich graphical interface for interactive data exploration and a Graph Processing Framework (GPF) that enables the construction of repeatable processing chains. Core capabilities include radiometric and geometric calibration, atmospheric correctionAtmospheric CorrectionAtmospheric correction removes the effects of atmospheric scattering and absorption from satellite and aerial imagery..., terrain correction, co-registration, interferometric processing for SAR data, biophysical parameter retrieval, and land cover classificationLand Cover ClassificationLand cover classification is the process of categorizing Earth's surface into distinct classes such as forest, cropla.... The platform handles the large file sizes typical of satellite data efficiently through tile-based memory management. SNAP is freely available and widely used by the remote sensingRemote SensingRemote sensing is the science of collecting data about Earth's surface without direct physical contact, primarily usi... community for research and operational monitoring. It integrates with Python through the snappy interface, allowing scripted automation of processing workflows. The platform's modular plugin architecture enables third-party extensions, and ESA actively maintains it alongside the Sentinel missions. SNAP is an essential tool for anyone working with Copernicus data for environmental monitoringEnvironmental MonitoringEnvironmental Monitoring is the systematic collection and analysis of data about environmental conditions, including ..., agriculture, disaster response, or climate studies.