Where can I find Sentinel L1C images (.SAFE) from 2015-2019 now that they are not available anymore on the Copernicus Open Access Hub?

Question

I am looking for Sentinel images from before 2019 in L1C quality and .SAFE format, as I want to correct them with sen2cor in SNAP to convert them to L2A quality. Where can I find them now that they are offline & not available on the Copernicus Open Access Hub? The Hub took them offline, and they are currently not requestable. USGS Earthexplorer and Google Earth Engine only provide TIFFs and JPEGs. So far I have only acquired JSONs from Amazon Web Services (connected to Sentinel Hub), but learning Python might make me able to acquire .SAFEs ..

Details: I am making a monthly NDVI timeseries from december 2015 - 2020 of my research location in Bolivia. I use Sentinel 2 L2A images for this, and Google Earth Engine. Because there are no L2A images before 2019 I will have to process L1C images myself and upload them to GEE.

Cheers

Answer 1

The older Sentinel data are available upon request in the Long Term Archive (LTA) Access. For the current status, see https://scihub.copernicus.eu/userguide/LongTermArchive .

You should be able to order data from the LTA either through the Copernicus Open Access Hub (https://scihub.copernicus.eu/dhus/#/home) which requires a registration.

An alternative in Python is to use sentinelsat which also offers LTA support: https://sentinelsat.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api.html?highlight=lta#lta-products

Important: here I just read that you need to install sentinelsat from its master branch at https://github.com/sentinelsat/sentinelsat as it hasn't been released yet (ref). See also a related closed issue on the matter.

All a bit tricky!