Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Satellite Image Metadata from the SCOPE experiment

In a collaboration between CSTARS, supported by a GoMRI RFP-II grant, and the CARTHE consortium, the Surfzone Coastal Oil Pathway Experiment (SCOPE) was conducted during the period 2-19 December 2013, focused on measuring the inner-shelf and surf-zone processes responsible for oil transport near Santa Rosa Island, FL. The intensive three-week experiment included a cross-shore array of fixed instruments to measure winds, waves, currents, and water properties from 10m water depth to the shoreline. Lagrangian drifters, dye releases, and moving-vessel measuring platforms were also used. This unique set of observations is valuable both for quantifying nearshore physics and mixing estimates, and for assessing nearshore model forecasts. The observations captured a wide range of wind and wave forcing due to a number of synoptic winter storms that occurred during the experiment. In support of the in situ measurements, 23 SAR image scenes were collected in order to identify the freshwater tidal plume created by the outflow of the Choctawhatchee River. The plume has a significant impact on the flow trajectories of materials on the surface near the coast, such as drifting buoys as observed during SCOPE, as well as surface oil observed during the Deepwater Horizon Incident. SAR imagery was collected by six SAR satellites in three sensor families:Cosmo-Skymed-1, -2, -3, and -4; TerraSAR-X and Tandem-X; and RadarSat-2. The original native metadata of six SAR satellites exist in three unique formats, making metadata access challenging. In this dataset, the native metadata of the 23 images has been saved in a single Extensible Markup Language (XML) file in one common format called CSTARS XML that is easily readable for both human and machine. Each SAR image in the collection has a corresponding node in the XML file, and a shapefile in the shapefile array file, which are cross-referenced.