While ingesting 8-band planetscope data via request builder, we noticed that not all data is available for ingestion; here is what I mean by “not all data is available”:
Configuration: Request builder -> 3rd Party Data Import -> TPDI Subscriptions
In the request builder: the “Search” results from the Provider Options section finds 5x data sets (tiles) for the date of January 16, 2024; we specify Max Cloud Coverage of 100% when subscription gets submitted
The Sentinel Hub Dashboard -> Subscriptions shows that only two data sets (tiles) were ingested for the same date
The result of this is that only data for a partial portion of the polygon is available (e.g. gaps)
Questions
Why is it that not all the datasets for a given date are available for ingestion?
What changes can we make to our subscription request so that all possible data is made available to us? Often we have very narrow or multiple small regions (polygons) where filtering a data set based on cloud coverage (if that is the case) for the entire date set (tile) is not the mos effective method, and we would like to have control over that QC.
Planet tiles have different publishing stages, most commonly preview and finalized. The most likely reason for this discrepancy between the number of tiles being returned by the different APIs is that subscriptions will only return finalized tiles.
Usually this is a good thing, because tiles in preview are available quicker but can still have problems with geolocation or other post processing steps, so they will not have the same quality as finalized tiles.
I think our confusion was that we are missing some scenes that are over a week old so we thought they would have moved from preview to finalized at some point. Does Planet potentially leave 100% cloud cover scenes as preview, or does sentinelhub just not ingest something with 100% cloud cover?
This would make sense, of course - we’re just doing a sanity check on our pipeline and want to understand.
Sentinel Hub does get everything which has the status finalized. As far as I am aware it can happen that Planet does not further process 100% cloud covered scenes.
Also be aware that for search the acquisition date is used to get relevant tiles, however for the subscriptions the publishing date is used.