subswaths

Subswaths are subdivisions of a sensor's swath in remote sensing and mapping. A swath is the broad strip of ground covered by a sensor in a single pass, and subswaths are narrower blocks within that strip. They arise from how the instrument scans or reads out data, or from the data processing pipeline that tiles the swath into manageable units. Each subswath corresponds to a contiguous region of along- or across-track data that can be treated semi-independently for calibration and geolocation.

Purposes: Segmenting a swath into subswaths helps manage high data rates and storage, enables subswath-specific radiometric and geometric corrections, and allows parallel processing. Incidence angles, viewing geometry, and atmospheric or instrument effects can vary across the full swath, so processing pipelines often maintain separate calibration parameters for each subswath. In some systems, subswaths are used to organize data for mosaic generation, quality control, and error tracking.

Contexts: The term is common across satellite optical and radar sensors as well as airborne lidar and sonar mapping systems. In practice, products are often produced by stitching together the processed subswaths into a single, seamless dataset, with metadata that records subswath boundaries and corrections applied. Subswaths are an operational concept that helps manage data complexity while preserving the integrity of geolocation and radiometric information.