WorldCover provides the first global land cover products for 2020 and 2021 at 10 m resolution, developed and validated in near-real time based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data.
More information can be found on the official project website https://esa-worldcover.org/ as well as on ESA project pages https://worldcover2020.esa.int/ & https://worldcover2021.esa.int/
Table of Contents
For WorldCover 2020 v100
Zanaga, D., Van De Kerchove, R., De Keersmaecker, W., Souverijns, N., Brockmann, C., Quast, R., Wevers, J., Grosu, A., Paccini, A., Vergnaud, S., Cartus, O., Santoro, M., Fritz, S., Georgieva, I., Lesiv, M., Carter, S., Herold, M., Li, Linlin, Tsendbazar, N.E., Ramoino, F., Arino, O., 2021. ESA WorldCover 10 m 2020 v100. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5571936
For WorldCover 2021 v200 🔥
Zanaga, D., Van De Kerchove, R., Daems, D., De Keersmaecker, W., Brockmann, C., Kirches, G., Wevers, J., Cartus, O., Santoro, M., Fritz, S., Lesiv, M., Herold, M., Tsendbazar, N.E., Xu, P., Ramoino, F., Arino, O., 2022. ESA WorldCover 10 m 2021 v200. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7254221
If you are using the data as a layer in a published map, please include the following attribution text:
© ESA WorldCover project [year] / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data ([year]) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium With year either 2020 or 2021 for the WorldCover 2020 and 2021 map, respectively.
The 2020 and 2021 can be accessed (viewed or downloaded) through different channels:
The products consist of 2631 tif files for a total of ~124gb. You can either download single tifs or aggregated zip files covering 20 deg by 20 deg tiles.
The aggregated zip files can be downloaded from:
If you want a more granular access you can download single files from the Terrascop viewer/downloader
The data is also available on the AWS Open Data Registry which hosts the COGs on a public S3 bucket s3://esa-worldcover/
Direct download from AWS avoids unzipping steps.
If you wish to restrict your download area to a certain bounding box or country,
you can use the download script under scripts/download.py
Make sure to install the required packages:
pip install geopandas requests tqdm
and run it with:
python scripts/download.py
This will download all the files. If you wish to filter on a country:
python scripts/download.py -c Italy
or a bounding box:
python scripts/download.py -b 0 0 20 20
You can also use both filters, the script will intersect the bounding box and the country geometry. Please note that if you want to download data for a country with spaces in the name, wrap it in quotes:
python scripts/download.py -c "United States of America" --dry
A list of available country names is printed if the specified country doesn't match any of them.
Additional parameters:
-o/--outputspecify an output folder. By default it will download in the current working directory.-y/--yearto download either 2020 or 2021 data (defaults to 2021),--dryrun a dryrun--overwriteoverwrite existing files. By default existing files will be skipped to avoid repeating a download after an interruption.
To download all the products using the AWS CLI tool:
To install the AWS command line interface, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-install.html or open a python environment and run
pip install awscli
Once the AWS CLI is installed you can copy the whole bucket:
aws s3 sync s3://esa-worldcover/v200/2021/map /local/path --no-sign-request
for WorldCover 2021 v200
or
aws s3 sync s3://esa-worldcover/v100/2020/map /local/path --no-sign-request
for WorldCover 2020 v100
(please modify /local/path to the desired download location)
We provide a series of Jupyter notebooks to illustrate how to access the data on AWS in your scripts
The ESA WorldCover product is provided free of charge, without restriction of use. For the full license information see the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publications, models and data products that make use of these datasets must include proper acknowledgement, including citing the datasets and the journal article as in the following citation.