Sentinel processing in GRASS GIS: a growing toolset for downloading, preprocessing and multitemporal analysis of Copernicus Sentinel data

The growing abundance of Copernicus Sentinel Earth Observation data has triggered community- and project-driven development of a set of tools to exploit its potential using GRASS GIS. This talk will give an overview of the existing functionalities, current developments, and application examples: The i.sentinel toolset allows for querying Sentinel data coverage for a region of interest, downloading from various data sources, importing into GRASS GIS, performing atmospheric and topographic correction and cloud/shadow masking. Preparation of data for multitemporal analysis is made possible in the t.sentinel and t.rast.mosaic extensions by automatic creation of space time raster datasets (strds) and temporal aggregation to achieve up to cloud-free temporal mosaics. Furthermore, a dedicated add-on based on ESA’s SNAP software handles Sentinel-1 SAR data preprocessing (radiometric calibration, speckle-filtering, geometric terrain-correction) and import. In all add-ons, effort is put in parallelization wherever possible to speed up the processing times of heavyweight Earth Observation data. This toolset allows the use of the entire range of GRASS GIS functionality for image analysis in various applications. We show use case examples for nationwide landcover classification, small-scale forest monitoring, flood mapping and more.