On 24 April 2018, a campaign will start on the Sentinel Open Data Access Hub and Copernicus Service Data Hub to republish the Sentinel-2 Level-1C products, from their historical format into the ‘Complete Single Tile' format introduced in December 2016.
Users who routinely automate the download of the new products should be aware that a significant volume of historical data will be published, and that these data may be re-downloaded automatically based on their ingestion date unless precaution is taken in the download scripts and workflows.
The affected dataset covers the sensing period from 04 July 2015 to 06 December 2016 (Sentinel-2A only). Approximately 340 thousand existing products will be repackaged creating over 1.3 million new products.
The republishing will cover the reformatting of the historical dataset of Sentinel-2A Level 1C products which do not feature either the Compact naming or the Complete Single Tile packaging characteristics, into their ‘Complete Single Tile' equivalent structure with the Compact naming representation.
The main features of the converted products as compared to their former counterparts are summarised below:
- The radiometric and geometric quality of the products will remain unchanged. Coherently with this, the Processing Baseline identifier (PB) tagging every product will also remain unaltered (i.e. expected between PB 02.01 and 02.04), and will keep tracing the quality of the data outlined in the data quality report, in relation to the processing baseline.
- The product formatting will comply with the Sentinel-2 Product Specifications Document (PSD) issue 14.2(*). In line with this format, the repackaging will take care of adding the TCI image inside the new products structure.
(*) It is highlighted that PSD 14.2 used for the repackaging will provide continuity with the format introduced on 06 December 2016 and used up until the end October 2017. Consequently, the generated products will not embed the subsequent evolution of the product format introduced on 23 October 2017, starting with PB 02.06.
The intended strategy for the replacement; is to publish the re-packaged data in batches. A list of the replacement data and the corresponding new re-packaged data will be available, prior to the publication of each batch. Once the batch has been published, the old format data will be removed, subsequently.
Please stay tuned for more news, before the commencement of the campaign.