Analysis-ready satellite data mosaics from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery

Abstract

Today's enormous amounts of freely available high-resolution satellite imagery provide the demand for effective preprocessing methods. One such preprocessing method needed in many applications utilizing optical satellite imagery from the Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives is mosaicking. Merging hundreds of single scenes into a single satellite data mosaic before conducting analysis such as land cover classification, change detection, or modelling is often a prerequisite. Maintaining the original data structure and preserving metadata for further modelling or classification would be advantageous for many applications. Furthermore, in other applications, e.g., connected to land cover classification creating the mosaic for a specific period matching the phenological state of the phenomena in nature would be beneficial. In addition, supporting in-house and computing centers not directly connected to a specific cloud provider could be a requirement for some institutions or companies. In the current work, we present a method called Geomosaic that meets these criteria and produces analysis-ready satellite data mosaics from Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery.•The method described produces analysis-ready satellite data mosaics.•The satellite data mosaics contain pixel metadata usable for further analysis.•The algorithm is available as an open-source tool coded in Python and can be used on multiple platforms.