SNAP (Sentinel Application Platform)

Satellite missions such as the Copernicus Sentinels deliver data in mission-specific formats that must be calibrated, corrected and reprojected before they can be analysed. SNAP (Sentinel Application Platform) is the common architecture behind ESA's toolboxes for this work: a free, open-source (GPL-3) platform for visualising, processing and analysing Earth observation data. It is an ESA development, technically led by Brockmann Consult and developed jointly with SkyWatch and CS, and ESA distributes it through its STEP website. Version 14.0 was released on 18 August 2026.

SNAP reads data from Sentinel-1, -2 and -3, ENVISAT and ERS, ESA Earth Explorer missions such as SMOS (through the SMOS Toolbox), and many third-party missions, including Landsat, MODIS, VIIRS, Pléiades, WorldView, EnMAP, PRISMA, TerraSAR-X, ICEYE and Capella. Its Microwave Toolbox covers SAR calibration, speckle filtering, terrain correction, interferometry (InSAR), polarimetry, soil moisture products and basic ship and oil-spill detection. Its Optical Toolbox covers Sen2Cor atmospheric correction, biophysical variables (LAI, fAPAR), vegetation, soil and water indices, and water-colour processors.

Users work interactively in SNAP Desktop, build repeatable processing chains with the Graph Processing Framework, run them from the command line, or call SNAP operators from Python and Java. SNAP has built-in parallelisation and can run in cluster environments, including Brockmann Consult's Calvalus processing system.

SNAP is aimed at environment scientists, value-adding companies, students and teachers. ESA expected it to pass one million downloads in May 2022, and its user community numbers more than 10,000 people. ESA and Brockmann Consult offer training courses.