Sentinel-2 product upgrade

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently announced changes to their Sentinel-2 processing software. Data produced by the updated Processing Baseline 04.00 is expected to be available at the Copernicus Australasia Regional Data Hub in mid January 2022. We recommend users carefully review the changes as there is a high risk they could affect processing streams and the creation of downstream products.

A summary of the changes is available here: https://scihub.copernicus.eu/news/News00931.

We draw your attention to the ‘Provision of negative radiometric values (implementing an offset)’. The new offsets are being applied to both L1C and L2A imagery, so any use of either product must take account of this.

“The offset will be reported in a new field in the General_Info/Product_Image_Characteristics section of the Datastrip and User Product Metadata". Thus, the conversion to top of atmosphere values changes to:

L1C_TOAi = (L1C_DNi + RADIO_ADD_OFFSETi) / QUANTIFICATION_VALUEi

Support for reading the offsets has been added to version 1.2.2 of the AusCopHub contributed code (https://auscophub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

ESA have made sample products available and users are encouraged to use them for testing their processing workflows: https://scihub.copernicus.eu/news/News00935.

ESA have also announced the release of more sample data in November: https://scihub.copernicus.eu/news/News00946.

Kind regards from the Copernicus Australasia Team.