Ten-Meter Sentinel-2A Cloud-Free Composite—Southern Africa 2016

Abstract

The processing of cloud free geo-referenced imagery is one of the preliminary processing steps of any land application. This letter describes the methodology developed to obtain a seamless cloud free composite of Africa for 2016 using Sentinel-2A data at 10-meter resolution freely available from the European Space Agency. The method is based on a hybrid method resulting from the merging of the two most robust time series methods namely the “darkest pixel” and the “maximum Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)” previously developed with the Advanced Very-High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) time series.

Keywords

• Sentinel-2
• remote sensing
• European Space Agency
• Copernicus
• continental
• cloud-free
• composite
• darkest pixel
• maximum NDVI