Imagico.de
The Musaicum European Arctic Islands
The Musaicum European Arctic Islands is a regional visible color satellite image mosaic of Svalbard (including Bear Island), Franz Josef Land (including Victoria Island) and Novaya Zemlya with a ground resolution of 10m. It combines recent Sentinel-2 satellite imagery into the highest quality and most cloud free depiction of the region in this resolution class available today.
It is generated using a classical mosaicing process derived from the methods and techniques developed for local mosaics but with a high degree of automatization. This eliminates most of the time intensive manual steps while maintaining high quality standards.
Compared to the Green Marble the Musaicum European Arctic Islands offers much higher spatial resolution (10m compared to 250/300m) at the cost of slightly more heterogeneous coloring due to the smaller data basis. Cloud occurrence is comparable to my hand produced local mosaics with less than about one in 100k pixels significantly affected by clouds.
Compared to the Musaicum EU-Plus and the Musaicum West Asia this mosaic is based on improved aggregation techniques with in particular better color calibration and uniformity. Compared to the Musaicum United States further adjustments have been made to address some specific issues of polar regions.
Primary data source for the image is Sentinel-2 imagery from 2022 to 2024, in small parts also 2020 and 2021.
Key properties
- Visible color mosaic of Svalbard, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya - individual islands are also available on request
- 10m base resolution
- Based on Sentinel-2 data from 2020 to 2024
- Includes full coverage of lakes and coastal waters, no coverage of the open ocean
- Shows atmosphere compensated surface color, available either as linear surface reflectance values or tone mapped for direct display
- Available with illumination as recorded and with shading compensation
Product packaging
The mosaic is produced in different projections for different parts of the coverage area and is assembled in the target projection on demand. The previews of the different parts shown here are in UTM projections. For use in web maps in Mercator projection by default a z13 grid or a z12 grid (19.1m/38.2m nominal resolution, better than 10m de facto ground resolution at latitudes of more than 60/72 degrees) is provided.
The standard form of distribution of this mosaic is with an alpha channel for seamless blending with a background image for the open ocean - like the Green Marble. This is illustrated in the samples below. Other variants can be produced on request.
Product options
In addition to the mosaic with illumination as recorded - which is the recommended version for direct visual applications - this mosaic is also available in a shading compensated version where the differences in illumination due to the topography and shadows cast by mountains are compensated for. This version can be used for example in applications where a synthetic illumination is used to generate a custom shading effect.
Supplementary to the visual color mosaic a vegetation data set is available with the same coverage and source data, documenting the fractional herbaceous and woody vegetation as well as fractional water cover for every 10m pixel.
Sample gallery
Musaicum European Arctic Islands license inquiry
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