Developed for World Bank Group

Sources

Sentinel 2A

Sentinel-2 is a satellite launched in mid-2015 providing publicly available data with a nominal resolution of 10m (for visible bands) and with a revisit time of 10 days (for 1 satellite, 5 days if including 1a and 2b). The high temporal frequency of Sentinel data permits better tracking of changes over time. Most of the zones have 6 or more cloud-free Sentinel scenes over the last 2 years. Historic analysis (before mid-2015) is more difficult because the only other publicly available source, Landsat data, has a resolution too coarse for these relatively small zones. For this project, 6 bands of Sentinel data were used: Red, Green, Blue, near-IR, and two short wave IR bands (at 1.6 and 2.2 microns). The SWIR bands are captured at about 20m resolution as opposed to 10m, but are resampled to a 10m grid to match the other 4 bands. These resulting multi-band images were clipped to the zones of interest then then visually inspected to remove those with clouds. Sentinel-2 provides a no-cost alternative. It is a much coarser resolution at 10m, so it is only good for rough estimates, and only goes back to mid-2015. An advantage is that it has a regular revisit rate of 10 days for every zone, so it is a good data source for monitoring sites during the Creation and Growth phases.