Hi!

Dive into this issue's highlights to learn more about the additional very high resolution data source available through Sentinel Hub, pre-computed cloud masks, winning ideas of the COVID-19 Custom Script Contest, simplified Sentinel Hub pricing plans, newly available Catalog API, important Sentinel Hub updates and more.

SPOT in Addition to PlanetScope and Pleiades Data

Airbus SPOT 6/7 data is now available through Sentinel Hub. It provides multi-spectral imagery that can be pansharpened to 1.5 meter resolution. SPOT data is useful for a number of remote sensing applications, such as vegetation monitoring, precise mapping or risk and disaster management, adding a link between 0.5 meter Pleiades and 3 meter PlanetScope. If you would like to access SPOT data, check our documentation and third party data import for details.

Baku Crystal Hall, Azerbaijan - With pansharpening the image, you can produce 1.5 meter true color images.

Cloud Masks at Your Service

If you missed our release of pre-computed cloud masks via Sentinel Hub for the entire Sentinel-2 archive in May, we invite you to take a look at it now. You will be impressed with the immediate and cost-efficient access to accurate cloud masks that add a great value to the service and give everyone fantastic opportunities to create amazing Earth Observation applications!

Also read a background story from our CEO, Grega Milčinski, on how we created a complete archive of Sentinel-2 cloud masks in less than a day with the help of Amazon Web Services.

COVID-19 Custom Script Contest Results

We are pleased to announce the results of the special edition of the Custom Script Contest focused on the effects of the COVID-19 crisis. The Contest was organized in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission in April and May 2020. We have received many interesting ideas and proposals that open new possibilities in remote sensing, and tackle crisis effects. The participants were able to explore a plethora of tools ready to be used for this purpose – starting with EO Browser, Sentinel Hub and xcube services, eo-learn, Jupyter Notebooks and more. The winning ideas are published on the official Contest page.

A RACE to Understand COVID-19 Lockdown Impacts

The ESA has put in action RACE - Rapid Action COVID-19 Earth Observation - which uses EO satellite data to measure the impact of the coronavirus lockdown and monitor post-lockdown recovery. A selected sample of the proposed ideas to the COVID-19 Custom Script Contest was also invited to the parallel contest, focused to bring these ideas to life as part of the RACE Dashboard - utilizing data available through the Euro Data Cube. Read more about the RACE in one of our guest blog posts and ESA's announcement.

Simplified Sentinel Hub Pricing Plans

After a couple of years of current pricing plans we have revised these in the line with experience gained and lessons learned. Options are being simplified. Processing volume covered within the plans is increasing. We are discontinuing the “Individual non-commercial” plan and replacing it with "Exploration", which is no longer limited to individual users - it can be used by as many users as needed, who all share the same processing volumes.

There will be no change of subscription costs for existing users and their plans will only change for the better:

• Users with an Individual non-commercial subscription will be converted into Exploratory ones, with the existing price.
• Users with an Individual commercial subscription will be converted to Basic, increasing the limit of monthly requests.
• Enterprise users will have increased monthly requests.

In case you have any concern related to these changes, do contact us, but as mentioned, all the changes will only bring benefits.

The Shadow of a Celestial Dance

The relative movements between Earth and Sun make the shadows on Earth behave in beautiful patterns. Check out how we can view these patterns from space by looking at satellite imagery via Sentinel Hub! Using our Python packages sentinelhub-py and eo-learn, you can download and process Sentinel-2 data cloud masks and solar angles in order to observe beautiful phenomena, such as the analemma. Read more about it in one of our blog posts.

A time-lapse of the solar tower in Ashalim, Israel. The tower’s shadow describes the analemma pattern in the course of one year. Sentinel-2 L1C data was extracted from Sentinel Hub with eo-learn.

Euro Data Cube Highlights

After a year of digging into technical details, mostly behind the scenes, we are proudly presenting the whole family of Euro Data Cube (EDC) services with the following highlights:

• Use, contribute and sell your EO data or application at EDC marketplace
• Fuse data from different data sources on-the-fly with recent EDC Sentinel Hub upgrade
• Use EDC geoDB for storing and accessing vector data
• Run a more complex analysis with xcube

EDC offers an interactive Python environment – JupyterLab – a convenient storage to organize and run Python notebooks easily. Try it out by uploading any notebook. But beware, it might prove to become your preferred Python notebook environment. Use it to run any of the example notebooks on the marketplace, such as our data fusion NDVI example, and start taking full advantage of the powerful EDC services.

Spatio Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) Compliant API

Up until now, the only way to search for available data from Sentinel Hub was to use Web Feature Service (WFS), which serves results in XML format. Now we have an alternative called Catalog API, which follows the modern and popular STAC specification, and returns results in JSON format. Check out its documentation and API reference for details.

Sample Sentinel-1 search response

Sentinel Hub Updates

• Sentinel Hub Requests Builder - Make sure to check the tool developed for easier construction of process API requests. This is our internal tool but we thought it would be useful for you as well, so we put it on-line. Read more.
• Batch Processing API - If you're interested in processing huge areas, you will want to use our Batch processing API due to performance and cost optimization. Since two weeks now you can specify how you want the results to be organized in your bucket, how to name the files, or even distribute them to multiple buckets. Robustness of Batch Processing was significantly improved. Read more about the API in one of our previous blog posts.

Transition to Evalscript V3

We would like to let you know that the V3 transition is continuing as planned. V3 version and simple script version are now preferred for scripting, while V1 and V2 versions are being deprecated. These will still work for the next few months, but their usage is discouraged. At some point in the future they will be disabled and all the remaining V1 and V2 scripts will be automatically converted to V3.

We advise you to consider upgrading your scripts to prevent any unwanted issues an automatic conversion might bring. To ease the process, see the conversion tool in the Sentinel Hub Dashboard under the Configuration Utility. Open your configuration and if any layer needs conversion, the message will appear on the top. To convert the script just follow the instructions.

Read also more about the reasons and impacts of the migration to V3 in our Forum post.

“Zombie” Fires in the Arctic— Clickbait or real?

You might already notice the term “zombie fire” flooding the media articles about wildfires. Would you like to know more about it, what it means and why we hear it so often recently? If so, we recommend reading Pierre’s blog post where he is explaining the term and wondering if it's just a new way to gain views or is it a real thing.

Coming Events

As things are slowly getting back to “new normal”, we will keep taking the necessary measures and maintain the safety of our team.

We still cannot invite you to any events in the near future. So please, send us your feedback via Forum or social media. We look forward to hearing from you. Stay safe!