Beginner question RE bushfire images

1

Hi,

I am just a everyday citizen, and I was quite intrigued when I stumbled across all the brilliant information available via the hub & I just had a very beginner question.

I’m in Australia, my families farm was impacted by the recent devastating bushfires, and I was quite curious to see if I could find images of the fires impact at its time of occurrence. This occurred in eastern Victoria, Australia (30th December 2019 12am-6am).

Using Sentinel 2 L2A on the date & time the fire passed through our area, there doesn’t appear to be any available data my question was, is the lack of images/data on those days just due to the nature of the satellite and when it happens to pass over our area in orbit? I just wasn’t sure what the refresh times on images were?
I see some dates in the selectable calendar are marked with a grey circle, so I’m assuming they are the days with recorded images?

I have been able to find some impressive images of nearby areas, and dates/times near to the day when the firefront passed through our area – but our actual sector on those dates doesn’t seem to have any images/data. I have mostly been using Sentinel 2 L2A on True colour & false colour - but I have had a look through all availble satelites & settings out of interest.
Sometimes the state of Victoria will have slices that are rendered, and slices that are just the map graphic.
Any info or advice would be much appreciated!
Cheers

2

Sentinel-2 has a revisit time of 5 days. In case there are cloudy skies at the time of the acquisition, you need to wait for another 5 days.

The “slices” that you are referring to, are actually orbit swaths - this is what the satellite acquires on the specific day.

You might want to look at Sentinel-3 as well, which has a daily revisit time, but also much coarser resolution.

3

That makes sense, thanks very much for that reply!

Would there happen to be anywhere you can recommend where I can read up about more of those sort of details?

Thanks

4

I suggest you start with our documentation and then follow the links from there on
https://docs.sentinel-hub.com/api/latest/#/data/Sentinel-2-L1C