The SENTINEL-2 mission is the European Multispectral Imaging Mission for the Copernicus joint initiative of the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA). The SENTINEL-2 mission includes 13-spectral band multispectral optical imager with different resolution (down to 10 m) and a swath width of 290km. It provides very short revisit times and rapid product delivery. The mission is composed of a constellation of two satellite units, SENTINEL-2A and SENTINEL-2B, sharing the same orbital plane and featuring a short repeat cycle of 5 days at the equator optimized to mitigate the impact of clouds for science and applications. SENTINEL-2 will allow exploitation for a variety of land and coastal applications such as agriculture, forestry, land cover and land cover change, urban mapping, emergency, as well as inland water, ice, glaciers and also coastal zone and closed seas applications. Following the launch of the Sentinel-2A in June 2015 and successful in-orbit commissioning phase (to be) completed in October 2015, the gradual release of the operationally qualified products to the user community via ESA’s Sentinels Scientific Data Hub will start/has started as of has started after IOCR planned on 15 October 2015. The full operation capacity is foreseen after the in-orbit commissioning phase of the Sentinel-2B unit in 2017. In this session, all scientists exploiting the main Sentinel-2 science and applications are cordially invited. The objective of the session is to present, demonstrate and discuss the state-of-the-art in scientific exploitation of Sentinel-2 data and the potential for new applications and future services.

Suggestion by Bianca Hoersch (16 Sep 2015)