Evaluating imagery from Sentinel satellites

Introduction

At Auswertung und Verfügbarkeit von Satellitenbildern - Umweltdatenquellen - Hiveeyes, we have been looking into the data provided by Sentinel satellites for specific use cases around agriculture and vegetation. Another application of countless others is Measuring Air Pollution from Space.

Here are two low-threshold offers to view the data near-realtime interactively.

Sentinel Playground

The dataset can be selected at the top right, and the navigation on the left then provides the appropriate layer selection.

The following choices sound interesting at first glance:

  • Sentinel-2 L1C

    • Agriculture - Based on bands 11, 8, 2
    • Vegetation Index – Based on combination of bands (B8 - B4)/(B8 + B4)
  • Sentinel-2 L2A

    • Vegetation Index – Based on combination of bands (B8 - B4)/(B8 + B4)

Earth Observation Browser

About

The Earth Observation Browser is a search tool for satellite imagery, including Sentinel-1, 2, 3, 5P and Landsat 5, 7, 8. It was released as open-source to bring earth observation imagery closer to its end users.

If you get an account with https://www.sentinel-hub.com/, this fine piece of software can also be self-hosted.

Here are a few more links to resources that describe how more specialized developments can be conceived using data from the Sentinel satellites.

General information

Data catalogues

Software

Especially on the topic of “agriculture” and “vegetation”, the last link has some tidbits to offer, which read quite fine and application-oriented and provide important background information on the respective evaluation methods. This is a good way to spend a few (still cold) days on. More detailed domain knowledge certainly won’t hurt either.


… wildly picked out from the massive amount of possibilities:

  1. SAR temporal analysis

  2. CORINE Land Cover visualisation