[Sentinel-pds] Sentinel-2 L2A availability

[Grega Milcinski]

Hi all,

you might have heard that in May ESA started to distribute “pilot production of Sentinel-2 L2A products over Europe”:
https://scihub.copernicus.eu/news/News00179

We have spent last few weeks establishing ingestion mechanism. As (unfortunately) expected, the data format was not exactly the same as for L1C, which is what we wanted to assure.
What ESA does to the data is running Sen2Cor processor with a default configuration (not the best option, but good enough for summer). This results in JP2 data without precints, which is why we re-encode the tiles. No additional changes are done to the data, except for renaming and restructuring in line with the same concept as L1C data.
Based on the informal information ESA has corrected the mistake with precints and will start distributing updated data in the next few weeks.

The data is available on S3:
s3://sentinel-s2-l2a

Note that L2A data is available in a Requester Pays bucket which means that you can access it freely within the EU Central region, but you will incur charges if you download it elsewhere

You can do a quick comparison of L1C and L2A within EO Browser:
http://apps.sentinel-hub.com/eo-browser/

L2A data are a few days delayed, something we hope will improve through time as well.

PS: as many of you are interested on the status of Sentinel-2B. On 15th of June there was an In Orbit Commissioning Review, which (informally) showed everything is OK. There are no formal report though. Immediately afterwards they should start distributing L1C data so they are 2 weeks late already. We expect/hope that data will be available any moment. If there are no additional changes introduced, they will be available within AWS in a few days after start of distribution, in the same bucket as current L1C so most of you should not even notice a difference, except that there will be more data.

Regards
Grega