ROOM
8
Space Lounge
Cloudless Europe
in hi-definition
T
his spectacular Sentinel-2 cloudless
layer image of Europe combines over
eight trillion pixels collected during
differing weather conditions between
May and September 2016, merging them into a
sunny homogeneous mosaic, free from
atmospheric impacts.
To create the image EOX IT Services
GmbH - an open source software oriented
company based in Austria, Vienna, that
works mainly on ESA and EU projects in
the Earth observation (EO) field - crunched
almost 30 terabytes of Sentinel-2 data
using its own software developed by EOX
IT specialist Joachim Ungar and co-founder
Stephan Meißl.
Sentinel-2 is an EO mission developed
by ESA as part of the EU’s Copernicus
programme to perform terrestrial
observations in support of services such
as forest monitoring, detecting land cover
changes and natural disaster management.
The second of two identical satellites,
Sentinel-2B, was launched on 7 March 2017
by a Vega rocket, following Sentinel-2A which
was launched in June 2015.
The satellites work in complementary
orbits, each carrying a single multi-spectral
instrument (MSI) with 13 spectral channels
in the visible/near infrared (VNIR) and short
wave infrared (SWIR) spectral ranges.
“Extracting cloudless pixels from the
Sentinel-2 archive and rendering natural
looking colours is just an example of many
possible use cases,” says Joachim Ungar.
“The main area of EOX activities
concerns the development and
advancement of e-Environment and geo-
spatial information infrastructures with
special emphasis on satellite EO systems
and next generation applications.”
