In my recent comparison of Landsat and Sentinel-2 as image data sources i mentioned the approximate number of images currently taken by those satellites every day. In reality this of course varies so i have put up a simple plot showing the recent scene numbers per day for Landsat 8, Landsat 7 and Sentinel-2.

These plots are based on data that is updated about every two hours – which might occasionally lead to a short delay when you request the page for the first time.

I would also have liked to show the actual daily coverage of the scenes counted in these plots. However as i already criticized for Sentinel-2 actual scene footprint data is hidden deeply in their file structure and difficult to access. More importantly it is also faulty in some cases, i.e. for scenes directly north of the Equator. This means there is no easy way to generate accurate Sentinel-2 coverage plots based on the ESA data without downloading all of the data at the moment.

That’s the thing with metadata – ESA provides tons of it but it seems they are not able to do proper quality assurance for that which seriously limits practical usefulness of course.