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I'm looking for a simple solution to display the latest available Sentinel 2 imagery (true color) in a webmap, using e.g. Leaflet or OpenLayers, for instance with a WMS or a XYZ layer. I thought this kind of web-service would be provided by some agency/company for free, but I cannot find one.

I found this "sentinel-hub" company that proposes WMS but it is not free. (BTW I don't like how they mislead users by calling themselves "hub" while they seem to have nothing to do with the official Copernicus Data Hub.)

I know I can download Sentinel data (see this well-documented post) but I don't want to process and serve the data.

EDIT:

By the latest imagery, I mean the latest cloud-free imagery. I think there are some flags on the Sentinel 2 imagery for this (clouds/no-clouds). I am looking for a specific location in Africa, but a global product would be fine.

Am I missing something obvious?

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  • Do you need a global coverage with full resolution (10m) ?
    – pLumo
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 14:36
  • I am guessing that the reason such a service is not offered for free is due to the huge (and rapidly changing) data volumes, and the amount of processing that would be required to producer a seamless spatio-temporal WMS service (that would be the obvious you are missing). Google Earth Engine host Sentinel, and many other data sets, and do much of the drudge work of ingesting, cleaning, etc, the data for you, but then you need to analyse it within their, admittedly amazing, environment.
    – John Powell
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 14:46
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because the notion that hosting a Sentinel WMS is a basic operation is totally underestimating what would be involved.
    – John Powell
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 14:48
  • I removed the "basic" ;-)
    – juminet
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 15:44
  • Sending a constellation of satellite in the space and freely delivering the satellite data is not a basic operation but this is what ESA did! Why not setting some WMS then?
    – juminet
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 15:47

3 Answers 3

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The closest you can get to that are EOX's cloudless map tiles: https://s2maps.eu/

These are not latest, but they are global, cloudless and they are free (CC BY 4.0). WMS and WMTS options available.

The problem with "the latest" imagery is that it will often be useless due to clouds. This makes it difficult to justify the processing and storage costs as mentioned in one of the comments above. EOX was processing the data for 2 weeks on 20 servers. One should theoretically do something similar on a weekly basis (a bit less computing as there is no need to select the best pixel). This is why we (disclaimer: I am coming from the above mentioned "sentinel hub" company; we apologize for the confusion with the name, it was not intentional) rather opted for the approach when the user can choose the configuration of her likeness). But this comes with some costs as well...

That being said, ESA and Copernicus have initiated a DIAS project, which should offer free WMS services as well, so you might find what you are looking for in spring 2018.

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  • Thanks! The s2maps is nice. Unfortunately I didn't find how to know the date of acquisition for a particular scene of s2maps.eu. BTW I guess it is a composite of several images...
    – juminet
    Commented Aug 25, 2017 at 7:40
  • Yep, your guess is correct. As they write on the page, "the Sentinel-2 cloudless layer combines over 80 trillion pixels collected during differing weather conditions between May 2016 and April 2017". This is a usual approach when building mosaics.
    – Grega M.
    Commented Aug 26, 2017 at 19:26
  • Well, in s2maps.eu there's still a significant amount of clouds present in Asia.
    – Frenzy Li
    Commented Jul 4, 2018 at 5:01
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Here is full Sentinel-2 catalog (resolution 20 m) with global coverage. It is not cloud free mosaic, but if you got ArcGIS you can turn on timeslider to find newest cloud free image manually (tested). Not sure if this works with other GIS.

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As a response to the original question, Terramonitor has launched a simple solution to display the latest available Sentinel 2 imagery (true color) in a webmap. And some other layers as well. Check it out: terramonitor.com

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