Find a clear Sentinel-2 scene, swipe two dates, take the GeoTIFF home.

What Sentinel-2 is

Copernicus Sentinel-2 Level-2A — the whole land surface, every five days

Sentinel-2 is the optical imaging mission of Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth observation program, flown by the European Space Agency. Two satellites share one orbit, so together they revisit the same ground every five days at the equator and more often toward the poles. The pass happens on a fixed schedule whatever the weather, which is why a cloudy day still produces a scene — of cloud.

• Thirteen bands from deep blue to short-wave infrared: four at 10 m (blue, green, red and near-infrared), six at 20 m (three red-edge bands, a narrow near-infrared and the two SWIR bands) and three at 60 m (coastal aerosol, water vapour and cirrus).
• Level-2A is surface reflectance — the haze and scatter of the atmosphere have already been modeled and removed, leaving how bright the ground itself is. That correction is what makes two dates comparable, which is the whole point of a swipe. The cirrus band is consumed by the correction, so Level-2A ships twelve bands plus the true-color image and the scene classification mask.
• Imagery arrives in 290 km strips cut into squares called MGRS tiles. One square at one pass is one scene — a granule roughly 110 km across — and a small area can sit where two, three or four squares meet.
• Level-2A was only produced for parts of the world in 2015–2016, so the archive this viewer searches is dependable from 2017 on.

Learn the technology

Sentinel-2, explained

How two satellites image every land surface on Earth every five days, what the thirteen bands reveal, and how the scenes are delivered. The walkthrough below shows the app step by step.

Watch it work

Watch the walkthrough

Search an area for Sentinel-2 scenes, swipe two dates to see what changed, download the GeoTIFFs — plus the Imagery, Showcase and Help tabs. The example is Mount Hood and the 2026 Grasshopper Fire.

How it works

Search an area, filter by cloud, set A and B, download

1. Search an area. Type a place, or draw a rectangle on the map and search that. The rectangle is also what a clip download is cut to.
2. Pick a date range. Last 30 days, Last 90 days, This year, or Custom with your own two dates.
3. Set a maximum cloud cover. A slider, 0 to 100, at 20% to start. It filters the archive, not the sky: raise it and the missing dates reappear, cloud and all.
4. Read the scene list. One row per granule, newest first, with the date, the MGRS tile, the cloud percentage, which satellite flew it and roughly how big the files are. Each row offers Show, Set A, Set B, Zoom and Download.
5. Swipe A | B. Set one side and that scene simply draws on the map on its own; set both and the map splits under a slider you can drag — the same ground, two days.

The cloud figure is for the whole tile, not your area, so a small site can be perfectly clear inside a 40% scene and socked in inside a 5% one — try a cloudy-looking date before dismissing it. Show tile grid, under the map, outlines the MGRS squares your results came from so you can see which one your area falls in. Pick A and B from the same tile and the swipe is like for like: identical footprint, identical projection, identical pixel grid.

Where the data comes from

One open public catalog

• Microsoft Planetary Computer Sentinel-2 Level-2A — the whole archive as Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs, searched through its STAC collection and drawn by its tiler. It supplies the scene list, every map tile and every download.
• Asset links are signed with an anonymous Planetary Computer token that the app fetches for you. There is nothing to sign up for. A signed link lasts under an hour, so re-open the app to sign fresh ones.

What you can download

• The whole scene. One Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF per band, each covering the entire tile — a 10 m band runs to a few hundred megabytes — or the Level-2A true-color image, red, green and blue already combined in one 3-band file.
• Just my area. One GeoTIFF of red, green and blue clipped to the rectangle you searched, at 10 m. Far smaller than a whole tile, and the one to reach for unless you need the full granule.

Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data. Sentinel-2 is free and open under the Copernicus license: use it commercially, redistribute it, build on it. Credit Copernicus and ESA, and the Microsoft Planetary Computer for the copy you took it from.

All Things Spatial is not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Space Agency, the European Commission or Microsoft. Confirm currency, accuracy and fitness for purpose with the source programs before relying on any image or index for operational, regulatory or financial decisions.

Renderings

Thirteen bands, five ways to look at them

Every rendering is computed by the tiler from the real bands, not from a picture of them, so an index is a measurement rather than a filter.

• True color — the scene as your eye would see it, the Level-2A true-color image.
• Color infrared — near-infrared as red: healthy vegetation glows red, water goes black.
• SWIR — short-wave infrared as B12/B08/B04: burn scars, bare rock and dry ground separate from green growth.
• NDVI — the vegetation index (B08−B04)/(B08+B04): red is bare, green is dense growth.
• NDWI — the water index (B03−B08)/(B03+B08): deep blue is open water.

Period mosaics

The Imagery tab also carries cloud-filtered mosaics of the whole world: one for the latest 90 days and one for each calendar year from 2017 to 2026, each built from every Sentinel-2 scene in that period at 20% cloud or less, newest scene on top. They are assembled at site-build time, and a mosaic takes the map on its own — a period or a scene swipe, never both at once.

Showcase

Five places where the change is plain to see

The Showcase tab opens each pair as a scene swipe — A on the left, B on the right — in the rendering that makes the change readable.

• Palisades Fire — Pacific Palisades, CA Dec 2024 → Jan 2025, in SWIR. Five days after the January 7 ignition: live chaparral reads green and the burn scar rust-red.
• Hurricane Helene — Swannanoa River, NC Sep → Oct 2024. The September 27 floods scoured the Swannanoa valley and its side streams down to bare sediment.
• Lake Mead — Las Vegas Bay, NV Jul 2017 → Jul 2022. At the reservoir’s record low, Las Vegas Bay shrinks back toward a river channel.
• Center pivots — Garden City, KS Apr → Jul 2025, in NDVI. April’s winter-wheat circles are harvested by July while the summer crops green up — one season, 98 days apart.
• Reykjanes eruptions — Grindavík, Iceland Jul 2023 → Aug 2025. Black lava from the Sundhnúkur eruptions now surrounds the Svartsengi power plant and reaches the edge of Grindavík.

FAQ

Common questions

Who owns the imagery?

Sentinel-2 is open data under the Copernicus license. The files come straight from Microsoft Planetary Computer, and the app opens straight to the map.

Why is a date I expected missing?

Almost always cloud — the cloud cap is a filter on the archive, so raise it and the date comes back. Two other reasons: the scene sat at the edge of a pass, because Sentinel-2 images in 290 km strips and a spot near the edge of a strip is only covered on some passes; or the date is before 2017, when Level-2A was still only produced for parts of the world.

What is an MGRS tile?

It is the square Sentinel-2 is cut into and delivered in — the code in the Tile column, like 10TFR. One square, one acquisition, one scene. Because a small area can straddle two, three or four squares, or a UTM zone boundary, the list can mix tile codes and the same day can appear twice. Turn on Show tile grid to see which square you are in, and take A and B from the same one.

What does it not do?

It reads Level-2A surface reflectance only — there is no Level-1C top-of-atmosphere option. It compares two dates at a time rather than plotting a per-pixel time series. The “just my area” clip is red, green and blue only; for other bands, take the whole-scene files. And every download link is signed with a token that expires within about an hour, so an old link stops working — re-open the app and it signs new ones.