The HQ-S2 project will generate advanced pre-processing algorithms for Sentinel-2 (S-2)
data and produce long time series of high quality (HQ) images corrected of cloud effects
and atmospheric noise built from combined Landsat-8 and available, current, S-2 scenes.
The resulting multi-temporal optical data set is an essential base product for advanced
applications, which will be tested in three specific use cases in the domains of agriculture,
forestry and urban areas.
The project results are the first step towards a novel high quality user-oriented S-2 service
potentially provided in the future via the EODC framework. As a prerequisite, the quality and
accuracy of the ESA standard Sentinel-2 (S-2) L1C products in terms of geometric and
radiometric calibration and correction will be investigated with a specific focus on areas
with high topographic variations. Near-real-time (NRT) filtering will be applied to a image
time series composed from S-2 and Landsat-8 data in order to fill observational gaps
between cloud-free imagery and to remove artefacts due to (undetected) clouds and poor
atmospheric conditions. HQ-S2 will take methods of data pre-processing implemented in the
ESA S-2 toolbox and will further develop and extend these to meet the needs of the use
cases and integrate and test these within the EODC Earth Observation data processing
framework.
