GMES Sentinel Data Policy

Sunday, 29 November, 2009

ESA recently announced the data policy for the GMES Sentinels. And as they say:

“The Sentinels comprise five new missions being developed by ESA specifically for the operational needs of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security programme (GMES).”

For geomorphologists, perhaps of most interest is Sentinel 2 which is a tandem mission of satellites with a repeat pass of 5-days (constellations are the thing at the moment!) encompassing sensors: a Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI). This is slated to have a 290 km swath width and 13 bands (VNIR and SWIR). These should be 4 bands at 10m, 6 bands at 20m and 3 bands at 60m spatial resolution.

The exciting part of the data policy announcement is the following:

“The new data policy ensures free-of-charge access to all Sentinel data as well as the products generated via the Internet to anyone interested in using them, mainly for GMES data use but also for scientific and commercial use. Other access modes and the delivery of additional products will be tailored to specific user requests, but not necessarily within ESA’s remit.”