Planet to Acquire Sinergise Business to Expand its Data Analysis Platform

Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of daily satellite imagery and insights about Earth, announced last month that it has signed an agreement to acquire the business of Sinergise, including our Sentinel Hub services. We're trilled to integrate our technologies with Planet to jointly build a powerful Earth Data Platform that unlocks the full potential of EO data. Together, we'll make the integration of imagery and other spatial data sources much easier than it is today.

Meet the Copernicus Browser

EO Browser joins the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem

With the launch of the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, the latest blog post reminds us how our own EO Browser came to be, its impact on Earth Observation applications and what the future holds with the new Copernicus Browser. Take a look at the available data and features of the Browser that we have developed together with our partners, as well as the future updates that will be released soon.

Sentinel Hub Webinar: Arctic Wildfires - What can (and can’t) we know from satellites?

Satellite data are extremely useful in monitoring wildfire activity, including in the Arctic. Predictions over a decade ago suggested a ‘fire invasion’ at higher latitudes. In this webinar held on April 6th 2023 Dr Thomas Smith explored whether and how this can actually be seen through the EO data. We discussed “zombie fires’ that seem to survive the winter in peat soils and re-emerge the next year to ignite new fires, as well as the missing parts of the current EO data offering to ensure consistent monitoring. Watch the webinar to learn about the role of climate change in the occurrence of these fires and how this process might further drive climate change.

The Arctic Wildfires topic was presented by our special guest Dr Thomas Smith, Associate Professor in Environmental Geography at the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics. His presentation is available here.

Challenges of Large Open Source Datasets for Building Detection in Africa

You may recall that a few months ago we published an open source hierarchical building detection algorithm for processing large areas. In our latest blog post, we report on some tips and warnings we learned while creating a large training dataset for Africa using the open source dataset. Since it's a large area, we looked at several machine-generated datasets, such as Google Open Buildings, Microsoft Building Footprints and the Replicable AI for Microplanning. Read on if you want to know whether current off-the-shelf machine-generated building datasets are locally accurate enough to create training data for building a continental-scale building map.

Example location from Serrekunda, Gambia - MBF, GOB and RAMP datasets shown together on Airbus Pleiades imagery from 2021 (© CNES 2021, Distribution AIRBUS DS).

Changes in the Calculation of Processing Units

As announced in our last newsletter, it's time to refine the calculation of processing units in Sentinel Hub. The changes, which came into effect on April 1st 2023, mainly address auxiliary services and shouldn't have a noticeable impact on the vast majority of users.

Looking at the Right Angle — an Easy Sentinel-2 BRDF Correction within Sentinel Hub

Implementing a generic normalisation to Sentinel-2 reflectance images to compensate for angular effects

Sunlight reflecting off surfaces behaves differently depending on the surface type: for some surfaces, most of the light is scattered forward (opposite direction of the sun), whereas for others, the light mostly reflects back towards the sun. These effects cause satellite images taken at different angles to look very different, despite observing identical surfaces. We provide an implementation of a universally applicable angular normalisation algorithm for Sentinel-2 images that can be used directly within Sentinel Hub services. Read our blog post for details.

Sentinel-2 cloudless mosaic of the Northern Territory, Australia (November 2019) before BRDF correction illustrates the problem. 🌐 EOBrowser.

Sinergise Expands Partnership with Planet to Bring Area Monitoring Services to the World

We expanded our partnership with Planet, allowing all Planet customers, developers, and data scientists to leverage the Sinergise Area Monitoring system to build solutions for monitoring agricultural activities across broad geographic scales. The system enables farmers, businesses, and governments to transform their management practices and report their sustainable impact. Building upon the successful implementation in several EU countries, this new partnership will help extend the reach and coverage of our Area Monitoring system to the entire world.

Other Sentinel Hub Updates

• Configuration Service Update - The Service now keeps track of the last update time for each Configuration Instance.

• Third-Party Data - The ingestion speed during periods of heavy load was improved.

• Bring Your Own Data
  • BYOC collections used by running Third-Party Data orders and subscriptions are now protected from accidental deletion.
  • BYOC now supports the ingestion of ZSTD-compressed TIFFs. Support for ZSTD compression in the output of TIFFs is coming soon.

• Batch Processing API - The API now supports 30-meter resolution for UTM-based grids.

• Asynchronous Processing API - The API now adds the information about the cost of the request when processing is complete. Read more!

• STAC collection for Copernicus DEM - We have added the Copernicus DEM STAC collection to the AWS Open Data Registry. Read more!

Upcoming Events

We hope to see you in person soon. Mark your calendars for our presentations at the following events:

April 23-28

European Geosciences Union - General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, hybrid event

May 16-18

ARD23 Satellite Data Interoperability Workshop, San Francisco, California, USA

May 22-24

New capabilities and countries in European Space Conference, Noordwijk, The Netherlands

June 26 - July 1

FOSS4G conference, Prizren, Kosovo

July 16-21

International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium - IGARSS 2023, Pasadena, California, USA

July 17

64th ISI World Statistics Congress - Earth Observation Data and Anticipatory Disaster and Relief Operations, Ottawa, Canada (register here)

September 4-8

The Open-Earth Monitor Global Workshop 2023, Bolzano, Italy

Feel free to send us your feedback via the Forum or social media. We look forward to hearing from you.