Agriculture is a key remote sensing application with high requirements. Short-term observation requirements in a global perspective for agriculture monitoring were tentatively defined by the GEO Agricultural Monitoring Community of Practice. The critical importance of the decameter resolution capabilities was highlighted to cover the whole diversity of the agricultural landscapes.
In this respect, the up-coming Sentinel-2 mission is a unique opportunity. Its 10-20m spatial resolution, its 5-day revisit frequency, its global coverage and its compatibility to the Landsat missions offer new opportunities for regional to global agriculture monitoring. In this context, the Sentinel-2 for Agriculture (Sen2-Agri) project has recently been launched by ESA, as a major contribution to the R&D component of the GEOGLAM initiative and to the JECAM network activities. The project will demonstrate the benefit of the Sentinel-2 mission for the agriculture domain across a range of crops and agricultural practices. The intention is to provide the international user community with validated algorithms to derive Earth Observation products relevant for crop monitoring. Sentinel-2, which is at the core of the Sentinel-2 Agriculture project, is one of the five missions that ESA is developing in the frame of Europe’s Copernicus programme.
This land monitoring mission consists of a pair of satellites, carrying each one an optical payload with visible, near infrared and shortwave infrared sensors. The sensors will include 13 spectral bands (4 bands at 10m, 6 at 20m and 3 at 60m) with a 290 km swath. It will provide continuity for the current Spot and Landsat missions. Sentinel-2, with its final two units in operation, will reach a revisit time of 5 days at the equator and 2–3 days at mid-latitudes. Agriculture is a key remote sensing application with high requirements. Short-term observation requirements in a global perspective for agriculture monitoring were tentatively defined by the GEO Agricultural Monitoring Community of Practice. The critical importance of the decameter resolution capabilities was highlighted to cover the whole diversity of the agricultural landscapes. In this respect, the up-coming Sentinel-2 mission is a unique opportunity. Its 10-20m spatial resolution, its 5-day revisit frequency, its global coverage and its compatibility to the Landsat missions offer new opportunities for regional to global agriculture monitoring.
In this context, the Sentinel-2 for Agriculture (Sen2-Agri) project has recently been launched by ESA, as a major contribution to the R&D component of the GEOGLAM initiative and to the JECAM network activities. The project will demonstrate the benefit of the Sentinel-2 mission for the agriculture domain across a range of crops and agricultural practices. The intention is to provide the international user community with validated algorithms to derive Earth Observation products relevant for crop monitoring.
The project will deliver:
- A core of processing strategies
- An open source and portable solution developed from the OrfeoToolbox to convert the Sentinel-2 L1c data into relevant EO products.
The Sen2-Agri EO products consist in a suite of four validated Sentinel-2 derived outputs building on each other, in line with the GEOGLAM requirements.
