We’ve long heard that customers, partners and users of our Geospatial Big Data platform, GBDX, would find incredible value in the ability to access open-source content with the same enterprise-grade tools we make available to conduct geospatial analytics with commercial satellite imagery.
On the heels of adding MDA’s RADARSAT-2 data to GBDX, we’re proud to announce the forthcoming availability of broad-area Earth imagery from the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Sentinel-2 spacecraft for our users to access and analyze within our cloud-based environment, at continental scale.
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The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 spacecraft spotted the emergence of a new island that formed off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras between March and June 2017. (Images: ESA)
Sentinel-2 is the latest and greatest in a long line of civil Earth observation satellites. Its twin spacecraft image the entire globe once every five days at 10 meter resolution, which is good enough to detect changes such as the appearance of new land features and monitor the health of vegetation. And courtesy of ESA, it’s free and open for public and commercial uses of all kinds. Combined with Landsat data that is available in GBDX, users have access to broad-area imagery that is updated as frequently as every two days.
Sentinel-2 is the perfect complement to the other data sources available on GBDX, including Landsat, RADARSAT-2, and of course, DigitalGlobe’s own 100 PB library of high-resolution imagery. Customers and partners will be able to unlock new use cases through the use of integrated data sources with varying coverages, resolutions and revisit rates. Accessing all this content in one location allows for faster, more powerful and more holistic analysis of our changing planet.
Complementary investments by ESA, Amazon and DigitalGlobe make this powerful integration possible. ESA funded and operates the Sentinel-2 mission. Amazon’s open data initiative is responsible for harvesting and storing the data in a uniform way within S3. And at DigitalGlobe, we’re taking it the last mile by integrating this new data source into GBDX so users worldwide can create new solutions to complex, large-scale problems.
Contact us to learn more about GBDX and how you can begin working with this data yourself!