Sentinel-1B failure (2021)
The failure of the European radar satellite Sentinel-1B in December 2021 halved the frequency of the images that flood mapping and parametric insurance rely on.
Free radar images from the Copernicus program see through clouds, which makes them the reference source for mapping a flood while it is happening. Part of parametric insurance and of mass loss assessment after a catastrophe relies on that data without any contract or service guarantee, as if it were a public good. When one of a pair of satellites fails, the revisit frequency degrades, and an index built on those images arrives later or misses the event. It is a dependency few contracts write down: a trigger's data source can itself fail, and it is not insured by those who use it.
On December 23, 2021, Sentinel-1B suffered a failure of its radar power supply; the European Space Agency declared the end of its mission on August 3, 2022. The constellation's revisit time went from six to twelve days until Sentinel-1C was launched on December 5, 2024.
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