Usable observations over Europe: evaluation of compositing windows for Landsat and Sentinel-2 time series

Abstract

Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archives provide ever-increasing amounts of satellite data. However, the availability of usable observations greatly varies spatially and temporally. Pixel-based compositing that generates temporally equidistant cloud-free synthetic images can mitigate temporal variability, by constructing uninterrupted time series using different compositing windows. Here, we evaluated the feasibility of using compositing windows ranging from five days to one year for 1984–2021 Landsat and 2015–2021 Sentinel 2 time series to derive uninterrupted time series across Europe. We considered separate and joint use of both data archives and analyzed the spatio-temporal availability of composites during each calendar year and pixel-specific growing season across a variety of time windows and hypothesizing data interpolation. Our results demonstrated opportunities and limitations in the available data records to support medium- and long-term analyses requiring uninterrupted time series of composites with sub-annual temporal resolution. Spatial disparities across different compositing windows provide guidance on the feasibility of workflows relying on different data densities and on the challenges in wall-to-wall analyses. The feasibility of consistent time series based on composites with sub-monthly aggregation periods was mostly limited to the combined Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives after 2015, yet in some geographies requires interpolation of up to 50% of data.