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Hello colleagues! I make WCS request (Sentinel2-L1C) for some area (bbox and geometry are set) and want to get available dates for given date range. And these dates looks strange for me:


2019-08-20 08:44:35+00
2019-08-20 08:44:50+00 (close to previous)
2019-08-23 08:54:32+00
2019-08-23 08:54:46+00 (close to previous)
2019-08-25 08:44:46+00 (only one result for this day!)
2019-08-28 08:54:28+00
2019-08-28 08:54:42+00 (close to previous)

(that’s only part of typical response)


As you can see, I have two results for almost each acquisition date (with just a few seconds between them). Can anyone explain me why it happens this way? And how should I choose the right one?


P. S. Just in case: I make requests with a sentinelhub Python library.

The swaths (roughly north-south) strips which Sentinel 2 records are split into sections. This happens when you have a bounding box which crosses the edge of these sections (I’m not sure the technical term).

For this reason, there is a “time difference” parameter you can set to merge the WCS results from different products so you don’t see the split.


is right.
What you see are the timestamps of “scenes” (granules), which is an artificial section of the orbit.
Sentinel-2 orbit takes approx 100 minutes. Unless you are close to the poles, you can easily assume that ±100 minutes is the same orbit. At poles, it is better to go with half of this time interval.


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