ESA WorldCover
esa
Global 10 m land cover classification derived from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2, cloud-optimised.
Before you use this
- A single-year classification. Land use changes faster than the release cadence in rapidly developing regions.
- ProvenanceUntraced
- DocumentationPartially documented
- Currency & maintenanceNot yet assessed
Eleven-class land cover at 10 m resolution, global, published as cloud-optimised GeoTIFFs. The primary siting exclusion layer for renewable development at continental scale, and a strong partial-read exemplar: a siting study needs one tile, not the planet.
- Identifier
https://catalog.opengrid.org/ds/esa-worldcover- Domains
- Geospatial & siting
- Keywords
- 10m, COG, Sentinel, exclusion, land cover, siting
Fitness for purpose
- Supports
- Siting and Land Use
- Not suitable for
- Capacity Expansion Modeling
The exclusions are the half you cannot get anywhere else. A dataset that is wrong for your question is worth knowing about before you build on it.
Structure
- Network topology
- Not captured
- Impedances
- Not captured
- Voltage classes
- Not captured
- Provenance class
- derived
- Upstream sources
- Not capturedWhich is a statement about what the catalog can show, not about how the data was produced.
- Licence
- CC-BY-4.0
- Redistribution
- Not captured
Access terms, per path
Cloud-optimised GeoTIFF, 3x3 degree tiles
none
Geographic
- Bounding box
- Global
- Granularity
- gridded
- Native CRS
- EPSG:4326
- Geometry types
- raster
- Features
- Not captured
- As WKT
POLYGON((-180 -60, 180 -60, 180 84, -180 84, -180 -60))
Temporal
- From
- Jan 1, 2021
- To
- Dec 31, 2021
- Update cadence
- irregular
- Time resolution
- Not captured
| Field | Definition | Type | Unit | Concept | Value basis | Provenance | Report an issue with this field |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
InputQualityInput observation quality | Count of valid Sentinel observations behind each pixel's classification, a proxy for confidence. Caveat: Low counts cluster in persistently cloudy regions, so classification confidence is spatially correlated rather than random. | uint8 | Not captured | Not captured | measured | Not captured | |
MapLand cover class | Eleven-class categorical land cover code following the WorldCover legend. | uint8 | Not captured | Not captured | modeled | Read from: esa-worldcover |
The catalog says why, rather than leaving the cell blank.
Three independent facets
Graded separately and never combined. A dataset can be perfectly current and completely unprovenanced, and one number would hide exactly that.
Provenance
DUntraced
No upstream source is recorded. This is a statement about what the catalog can show, not about how the data was produced: a carefully measured dataset with no recorded lineage grades D, because a user cannot trace it.
Documentation
BPartially documented
0 of 2 fields are fully documented, 2 carry a definition. 2 lack a unit.
Currency & maintenance
–Not yet assessed
The stated cadence is 'irregular', which is not an interval, so 'past due' has no meaning for this dataset.
Not the same as a poor grade. Provenance and documentation are graded from field-level metadata, which this record does not carry yet.
Visible without signing in, deliberately: an evaluator comparing catalogs should not have to register first.
- 3Complementary
- Global Wind AtlasStrength 2 of 5Complementary
Both feed: Siting and Land Use.
- · Both feed Siting and Land Use.
- · Bounding boxes overlap over 99% of their combined extent.
- · Both are gridded.
- ECMWF ERA5 reanalysisStrength 2 of 5Complementary
Both feed: Siting and Land Use.
- · Both feed Siting and Land Use.
- · Coverage overlaps from 2021-01-01 to 2021-12-31.
- · Bounding boxes overlap over 80% of their combined extent.
- · Both are gridded.
- NREL National Solar Radiation DatabaseStrength 1 of 5Complementary
Both feed: Siting and Land Use.
- · Both feed Siting and Land Use.
- · Coverage overlaps from 2021-01-01 to 2021-12-31.
- · Bounding boxes overlap over 24% of their combined extent.
- · Both are gridded.
OpenGrid redirects you to the source and never proxies the bytes. For a partial read of a large dataset, use the SDK — it fetches an access plan and reads only the slice you asked for.
Cloud-optimised GeoTIFF, 3x3 degree tiles
● Checked and working- Size:
- 1 TiB
- No account needed:
- Yes
- Supports byte ranges:
- ✓