SENTINEL-2 Level-1C and Level-2A products are made available to Users in SENTINEL-SAFE format, including image data in JPEG2000 format, quality indicators (e.g. defective pixels mask), auxiliary data and metadata.

The SAFE format has been designed to act as a common format for archiving and conveying data within ESA Earth Observation archiving facilities. The SAFE format wraps a folder containing image data in a binary data format and product metadata in XML. This flexibility allows the format to be scalable enough to represent all levels of SENTINEL products.

A SENTINEL-2 product refers to a directory folder that contains a collection of information (Figure 1). It includes:

• a product metadata file in XML format that describes the physical organization and the content of the product
• a manifest.safe file which holds the general product information in XML
• a GRANULE subfolder, including image data (granules/tiles) in JPEG2000 format as well as quality indicators (quality masky masks, quality reports, etc.)
• a DATASTRIP subfoldercontaining information at datastrip level
• an AUX_DATA subfolder containing the set of auxiliary files that can be embedded in the product
• a rep-info subfolder containing the XSD schemas describing the product components
• an INSPIRE XML file, that is a metadata file based on INSPIRE Metadata regulation
• a HTML subfolder, containing a product presentation file allowing to display easily the main content of the product.

Figure 1: SENTINEL-2 product physical format