Google Earth Engine
Freemium
Planetary-scale geospatial analysis in the cloud — the data catalogue and compute behind modern water remote sensing.
Sentinel-2
ActiveFree 10-20m multispectral imagery, 5-day revisit — the imagery backbone under WorldCover and Dynamic World.
by European Space Agency
- Pricing
- Free
- License
- Copernicus data licence (free, worldwide)
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Google Earth Engine, Any GIS, Python
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About Sentinel-2
Sentinel-2, a two-satellite constellation operated by ESA under the Copernicus programme, captures 13-band multispectral imagery at 10-20m resolution with a combined 5-day revisit, freely available with no registration through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, AWS, and Google Earth Engine. Its 2015-present archive is now long enough for multi-year change detection.
Most of the higher-level products in this collection — WorldCover, Dynamic World, JRC surface water updates — are built on Sentinel-2 underneath. For custom analysis (bespoke NDVI, flood-extent mapping from a specific event, turbidity screening), the raw imagery itself is often the better starting point than a pre-classified product.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Alternatives to Sentinel-2
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with Sentinel-2.
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.
geemap
Open Source
Python + Google Earth Engine without the pain — interactive mapping and analysis of petabyte-scale water data.
Dynamic World
Free
Near-real-time 10m land cover from Google/WRI, updated every Sentinel-2 pass — land cover that keeps up.
ESA WorldCover
Free
Global 10m land cover from Sentinel-1/2 — the highest-resolution free global land cover map available.
QGIS
Open SourceVerified
The free, open-source GIS that has become the default spatial platform for water engineers worldwide.