SATCOAST: Case Studies

The Wash

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A picture of the RSPB Freiston Shore reserve on The Wash
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An aerial photo of the RSPB reserve, but showing the sea and marsh
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Some of the wildlife off Freiston Shore
I've downloaded Sentinel-2 files in both RGB and NDVI formats to show the region. The NDVI format shows different levels of vegetation, it is used to measure how much plants are growing in the Spring and where they are colonising.
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On the left an RGB image of Freiston Shore, same as on the photographs above. On the right an NDVI image showing the vegetation growth.
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These show Landsat images from 1977 to 2017. The land is the Wash coast and shows a Bank being built in 1977, the new land growing crops in 2012, but flooded in 2017 (also shown in the picture). The land is now lost back to the sea.

HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN CASE STUDY


I used imagery from the Sentinel-2 satellite constellation of the European Space Agency Copernicus mission

You can download Sentinel 2 data for free from
​http://sedas.satapps.org

Watch out though the files are huge so just download the critical ones.
Sentinel 2 is an optical satellite and has data from 12 wavebands at 10m resolution. If you want to view the images you also need to download the Sentinel-2 toolbox (SNAP) which is an image processing file. You can get this at;
step.esa.int/main/download/

As a top tip when you download the file from SEDAS it will be a c.700MB zip file, you need to unpack it. The file you need to load on SNAP will be called something like MTD_MSIL1C.xml. If you open that file SNAP will do the rest. Enjoy!