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S2 Tile Date Discrepancy

  • April 26, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 117 views

I am copying Sentinel-2 L1C tiles from the SentinelHub S3 bucket to my own and using the tile ID to rename the file. A snippet of my code is as follows:

    wfs_iterator = WebFeatureService(
        bbox,
        date_range,
        data_collection=data_collection,
        maxcc=cloud_max,
        config=config
    )
    return [(tile['properties']['id'], tile['properties']['path']) for tile in list(wfs_iterator)]

I’ve noticed for a few tiles, the date as indicated in the AWS path differs from the date in the Tile ID. For example, the tile stored at s3://sentinel-s2-l1c/tiles/18/N/YK/2015/10/19/0 has the Tile ID S2A_OPER_MSI_L1C_TL_MTI__20160410T011941_A001695_T18NYK_N02.01. Is there a reason for this discrepancy? Does the date in the Tile ID not necessarily correspond to the sensing date of the tile? I can’t seem to find a breakdown of the naming conventions for the Tile ID, so I can’t confirm exactly what the date is supposed to be. However, for most other tiles, the date in the AWS path matches the date in the Tile ID.

3 replies

If you check S2 user guide, “Old format Naming Convention”, you will see that for granules, this is a creation time, not sensing time:


This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks! Couldn’t figure out the search terms to find the naming convention.


try “sentinel-2 granule naming convention”