SNAP is the common software platform for the three Sentinel Toolboxes which are developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the scientific exploitation of the Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 missions.

The intention of the development is to primarily support the Sentinel missions for not only research but also in an operational context. In addition, a great deal of the development will be to improve and produce a common application platform for all toolboxes for the next 10 years.

ESA is developing three new free open source toolboxes for the scientific exploitation of the Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 missions.

The Toolboxes will be based on the proven BEAM/NEST architecture inheriting all current BEAM and NEST functionality including multi-mission support for SAR and optical missions and provide an evolutionary update to the architecture to support ESA and third party missions for years to come. In practical terms this means that all three toolboxes will be based on the extension of the existing open source BEAM and NEST toolbox framework. We will be restructuring all the code from BEAM and NEST into this common Sentinel framework. The common platform will be jointly developed by Array (S-1), C-S (S-2) and Brockmann Consult (S-3). The project will run through the next two years with releases every four months. The first public release of the software will be available in September 2014 and be released under GNU GPL open source license.

This work is funded through the Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions (SEOM) a new program element of ESA's fourth period of the Earth Observation Envelope Programme (2013-2017), referred to as EOEP-4.

EOEP-4 will pursue a long-term exploitation strategy and address the broad and growing spectrum of EO user communities, including science, applications and services development.

Clone the source code and related repositories into a folder SNAP/

git clone https://github.com/senbox-org/snap-engine.git

git clone https://github.com/senbox-org/snap-desktop.git

After checking out the source code from the repositories the further steps differ depending on either if you want to use the new NetBeans based runtime or if you still want to use the old ceres runtime based configuration. Read further at the corresponding section

❗Note: the snap-engine and snap-desktop repositories are mandatory. The toolboxes are each optional and currently only the Sentinel-3 Toolbox is currently configured to be used with SNAP.

git clone https://github.com/senbox-org/s1tbx.git

git clone https://github.com/senbox-org/s2tbx.git

git clone https://github.com/senbox-org/s3tbx.git

1. CD into SNAP/snap-engine:

   mvn install

2. CD into SNAP/snap-desktop:

   mvn install

3. CD into SNAP/snap-desktop/snap-application:

   mvn nbm:cluster-app

4. Start the application via Maven:

   mvn nbm:run-platform

It is also possible to do step 3 and 4 at once:

mvn nbm:cluster-app nbm:run-platform

1. Create an empty project with the SNAP/ directory as project directory

2. Import the pom.xml files of snap-engine and snap-desktop as modules. Ensure not to enable the option 'Create module groups for multi-module Maven projects'. It would create an odd project structure but would still work. Everything can be default values.

3. Set the used SDK for the main project. A JDK 1.8 or later is needed.

4. Use the following configuration to run SNAP in the IDE:

   • Main class: org.esa.snap.nbexec.Launcher
   • VM parameters: -Dsun.awt.nopixfmt=true -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true -Dsun.java2d.dpiaware=false All VM parameters are optional
   • Working directory: SNAP/snap-desktop/snap-application/target/snap/
   • Use classpath of module: nbexec

The Sentinel-3 Toolbox is configured to build all the modules into the cluster directory ´${project.basedir}/../target/nbmCluster´ This cluster can be set as parameter to the above mentioned launcher. Specify as program parameter e.g. ´--clusters "SNAP\s3tbx\target\nbmCluster\netbeans\s3tbx"´

Enjoy!