Expanding Terrascope’s product portfolio
Terrascope is the Belgian Earth Observation Data Space, dedicated to providing easy access to Copernicus Sentinel satellite data and unique derived information products. In 2026, we have ambitious plans to expand our data and services offering.
Marine and Air Quality applications
Collaboration with two federal scientific institutions will expand Terrascope’s product portfolio:
- Marine applications: these new datasets / information products are based on work done at the Royal Institute for Natural Sciences (RBINS)
- Atmospheric studies: datasets / information products defined by the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA-IASB).
Higher resolution datasets
We will integrate high resolution datasets from drones (results from the FWO Emphasis project) and airborne surveys, including the orthophoto coverage of Wallonia made in 2025, expanding our product portfolio toward higher spatial resolutions.
Hyperspectral data
The ESA IPERLITE mission, built by a Belgian consortium and launched on 25 November 2025,is currently in commissioning phase. It will acquire hyperspectral data on a global scale (approximately 17 500 km2 per day). This data will support remote sensing research, and serve as a test dataset for integrating hyperspectral data in the Terrascope STAC catalogue and openEO services.
Global Land Cover Monitoring
Following high demand for the ESA WorldCover datasets, we will also provide results from the Copernicus Land Cover and Tropical Forestry Mapping (LCFM) service, offering global land cover and land cover change maps from 2020 onwards. Discover the 2020 map in the viewer of consult it in the Terrascope STAC browser
Sentinel-2 Long Term Monthly Median composites (2017-2024)
These products can be used in detection of trends by comparing your own images with the long-term median on a monthly basis or on an annual basis (when the 9 subannual mosaics are combined to cover the whole year). Discover the data in the Terrascope STAC browser
Compressed Sentinel-2 data
After the successful experiment with the Major TOM dataset which demonstrated that Sentinel-2 data can be compressed by a factor of more that 30 without significant loss, we will produce a collection of compressed Sentinel-2 Level 2A data next to the existing uncompressed data collection. This will serve as a proof of concept, and will potentially lead to a broader adoption of compression in Terrascope workflows.
Cloud-free images of vegetation indicators by CROPSAR
Anyone who has used Sentinel-2 data is confronted with the issue of cloud cover, which makes a significant number of satellite images less usable or not at all. The CROPSAR service already provides a solution by providing time series of points or areas through integration of Sentinel-1 SAR data (practically not affected by cloud cover) and Sentinel-2 optical data. This is now being taken one step further by providing the time series for every pixel, generating a synthetic cloud free product every 5 days.
User Data Integration
Apart from the extension of our datasets we will also add an option to allow users to integrate their own data into the Terrascope ecosystem, with full control regarding access by other users. This is expected to be released/available …
openEO chatbot
We are working on an AI agent that will help you by providing a natural language interface where you can define the results that you want to obtain. The agent then converts that into an openEO workflow and runs it.
If you have any questions related to this, then please contact us.
