ESA WorldCover: Global 10m Land Cover Composites from Sentinel Satellites

ESA WorldCover 10m Annual Composites provide global land cover mosaics for 2020 and 2021. The data consists of four distinct products derived from yearly median composites of Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. VITO produced these Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs as part of the European Space Agency's WorldCover project.

Use Cases

• Classifying land cover types based on Sentinel-2 RGBNIR and SWIR spectral bands.
• Monitoring vegetation health and changes using NDVI percentile composites.
• Analyzing terrain and surface structure with Sentinel-1 GAMMA0 radar backscatter composites.
• Creating high-resolution (10m) global land use maps for environmental modeling.

Strengths

• Provides four distinct, co-registered data products (RGBNIR, SWIR, NDVI, GAMMA0) for each year.
• Global coverage at a consistent 10-meter spatial resolution for most bands.
• Data for two consecutive years (2020 and 2021) enables temporal analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The SWIR composite is delivered at a coarser 20-meter resolution.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

European Space Agency (ESA) WorldCover project, produced by VITO.

Collection Method

Yearly median composites created from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 GRD and Sentinel-2 L2A archives.

Time Range

2020 and 2021

Geography

Global