The Sentinel-2 Toolbox consists of a rich set of visualisation, analysis and processing tools for the exploitation of MSI data from the upcoming Sentinel-2 mission.

As a multi-mission remote sensing toolbox, it also supports the ESA missions Envisat (MERIS & AATSR), ERS (ATSR), as well as third party data from RapidEye, SPOT, MODIS (Aqua and Terra), Landsat (TM), ALOS (AVNIR & PRISM) and others. The various tools can be run from an intuitive desktop application or via a command-line interface. A rich application programming interface allows for development of plugins using Java or Python.

The Sentinel-2 Toolbox has been developed for ESA by CS in partnership with Brockmann Consult, CS-Romania, Telespazio Vega Deutschland, INRA and UCL.

The first release of the Sentinel-2 Toolbox was as a stand-alone toolbox intended for exploitation of high resolution optical data. Teh Sentinel-2 Toolbox It provides all tools known from the ESA BEAM toolboxes, plus a Sentinel 2 product reader, a SPOT 1 to 5 product reader, and a RapidEye product reader. A subsequent release has seen it included (along with a single installer and application interface and S-1 and S-3 readers) in the common Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP).

The Sentinel-2 Toolbox can be downloaded from the Science Toolbox Exploitation Platform (STEP).

Open Source Development

The Sentinel Toolboxes and full source code is distributed freely under the GNU GPL license.

Open source makes software inherently independent of specific vendors, programmers and suppliers. The software can be freely distributed and shared by large communities including the source code and the right to modify it.  This ensures that there isn't a single entity on which the future of the software depends on and allows for unlimited improvements and tuning of the quality and functionality of the software.

As open source, future evolution and growth of the toolboxes will be possible by the community of users and developers that contribute back to the project.

The source code is available on Github.

User Discussion Forum

Visit the Sentinel-2 toolbox forum where you can contact the Sentinel-2 Toolbox team; discuss processes & functionality with others, and more.