Global Land Cover SWIR Composite at 10-Meter Resolution

ESA WorldCover Sentinel-2 yearly SWIR median composite is a global 10-meter resolution color image derived from Sentinel-2 satellite data. It provides worldwide land coverage per 1x1 degree tile for the year 2020, generated by a consortium led by VITO. The composite uses the median of the SWIR timeseries after cloud and shadow removal.

Use Cases

• Classify land cover types by analyzing SWIR B11 and B12 band values in each pixel.
• Monitor vegetation health and water content changes using the SWIR spectral reflectance composite.
• Detect urban expansion or deforestation by comparing 2020 SWIR median values with other years.
• Train convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation using the 10-meter resolution GeoTIFF tiles.
• Assess agricultural or forest conditions by examining the median SWIR reflectance within specific geographic tiles.

Strengths

• Global land coverage at 10-meter spatial resolution.
• Data processed to remove clouds and cloud shadows for clearer analysis.
• Organized into standardized 1x1 degree tiles for manageable processing.

Limitations

• No data tiles for ocean areas and inner ice sheets, creating coverage gaps.
• Single reference year (2020) limits temporal trend analysis.
• Specific row, column, and file size metrics are unknown.

Provenance

Source

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

Collection Method

Generated from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery by calculating the median of the SWIR (B11, B12) timeseries for 2020 after cloud masking.

Time Range

2020

Freshness

null

Geography

Worldwide land coverage, excluding oceans and inner ice sheets.