Copernicus Sentinel-2 Collection-1: A Consistent Dataset of Multi-Spectral Imagery with Enhanced Quality

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission, with its Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B units, offers since several years now a massive quantitative and qualitative resource for the Earth Observation community. Since the launch of Sentinel-2A in 2015, and Sentinel-2B in 2017, many lessons have been learnt leading to continuous improvements of the radiometric and the geometric performances. However, the current archive is composed of heterogenous processing baselines with inconsistent product formats and uneven data quality, which limits its use for multi-temporal monitoring applications.To overcome this limitation, the Copernicus program has undertaken a complete reprocessing with the latest processing baseline (05.00). It concerns the L1C (Top-Of-Atmosphere reflectance) and L2A (Surface Reflectance) products. This paper recalls the features of Collection-1 products and gives an overview of the first validation results.