Dynamic World
Free
Near-real-time 10m land cover from Google/WRI, updated every Sentinel-2 pass — land cover that keeps up.
ESA WorldCover
ActiveGlobal 10m land cover from Sentinel-1/2 — the highest-resolution free global land cover map available.
by European Space Agency
- Pricing
- Free
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Google Earth Engine, Any GIS
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About ESA WorldCover
ESA WorldCover classifies the entire global land surface at 10m resolution into 11 land cover classes, derived from Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical composites for 2020 and 2021, validated with a dedicated field campaign. At 10m it resolves individual fields and urban blocks that 300m-1km legacy land cover products (like ESA CCI Land Cover) blur together.
For runoff-coefficient and curve-number derivation, impervious-surface estimation and any study where land-cover resolution matters as much as its classification accuracy, WorldCover is the current global standard.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Appears in collections
- Satellite Data for Hydrology & Water Engineering
The satellite and reanalysis datasets H&H engineers actually reach for — DEM to GRACE.
Alternatives to ESA WorldCover
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with ESA WorldCover.
Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
JRC Global Surface Water
Gov-Public
Pixel-level surface water history since 1984, built from the entire Landsat archive — where water has been, and when.
A consistent annual global land cover record at 300m from 1992 — long enough to trend land-use change against.
Sentinel-2
Free
Free 10-20m multispectral imagery, 5-day revisit — the imagery backbone under WorldCover and Dynamic World.
Microsoft Planetary Computer
Freemium
A STAC API and Jupyter environment over petabytes of satellite data — Sentinel, Landsat, MODIS, ERA5, CHIRPS and more.