Sentinel Hub for search and download L2 data

Sentinel@AWS
1

Hi,
I’m new to sentinel hub, but have been using sentinelsat and Copernicus for a while now.

I am trying to see if I can switch to sentinel hub. The main reason is that Copernicus hub archives older products, so to get the old ones you have to request them first, wait for 24h and then try again.

My use case is very simple: based on an input shapely polygon, a date range and cloud coverage, download all Sentinel Level2A products which match the criteria in SAFE format.

After playing with a trial account for a bit, I have the following questions:

  1. Can I download products which are older than 12 months - which is the availability limit which Copernicus currently has? I think this should work since all data is stored in AWS already, no matter how old?

  2. Polygon-based search: Using sentinelsat, one could query SAFE “products” based on a shapely polygon. I see that with sentinel hub, you need a bbox instead, but that you can construct a bbox from a Geometry, which in turn can be constructed from a shapely polygon. While this works, I think it might return more products than it should - because a bounding box is obviously a larger rectangle than the input polygon. Is there an option not to use a bounding box, but to pass the actual polygon instead?

  3. I’ve noticed that opensearch cannot be used to search for Level2 data, only Level 1 - is this by design, or it’s a feature which will be added at some point?

  4. Given #3, is there no way to search L2 products, without needing a sentinel hub account? Do I have to use the WebFeatureService?

  5. With Copernicus/Sentinelsat, there is an “area_relation” option to filter products on, where the 2 possible values are ‘Contains’ or ‘Intersects’ - is there an equivalent in any of sentinel hub’s search services?

And in the end - just the general question - what would be the best way of using sentinel hub to achieve the described use case?

Thanks!

2
  1. Complete archive is available.
  2. You can use WFS service, which does support geometry input:
    https://www.sentinel-hub.com/develop/api/ogc/standard-parameters/wfs/
  3. Level 2 data is not maintained in OpenSearch. There is currently no plan to add it there, due to other priorities.
    You will find it in WFS however.
  4. Yes.
  5. No, there is just intersects.

https://sentinelhub-py.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/aws_request.html

3

Thanks for your quick answer.

Is there a way to get the product in the SAFE format but in an archived format - zipped or anything else? Or I have no other way but get the entire SAFE folder locally and zip that?

4

There are no zip archives so you will have to do zipping yourself.

Ideally though you would simply process the data within the cloud.