EODC High Quality Sentinel-2 Services - preprocessing and experimental testing of improved applications

The HQ-S2 project will generate advanced pre-processing algorithms for Sentinel-2 (S-2) data and produce long time series of high quality (HQ) images corrected of cloud effects and atmospheric noise built from combined Landsat-8 and available, current, S-2 scenes. The resulting multi-temporal optical data set is an essential base product for advanced applications, which will be tested in three specific use cases in the domains of agriculture, forestry and urban areas. The project results are the first step towards a novel high quality user-oriented S-2 service potentially provided in the future via the EODC framework. As a prerequisite, the quality and accuracy of the ESA standard Sentinel-2 (S-2) L1C products in terms of geometric and radiometric calibration and correction will be investigated with a specific focus on areas with high topographic variations. Near-real-time (NRT) filtering will be applied to a image time series composed from S-2 and Landsat-8 data in order to fill observational gaps between cloud-free imagery and to remove artefacts due to (undetected) clouds and poor atmospheric conditions. HQ-S2 will take methods of data pre-processing implemented in the ESA S-2 toolbox and will further develop and extend these to meet the needs of the use cases and integrate and test these within the EODC Earth Observation data processing framework.