The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission brings us this cloud-free view of Svalbard, a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.
Zoom in to explore this image at its full 10 m resolution or click on the circles.
Located north of mainland Europe, Svalbard is roughly halfway between Norway and the North Pole. It is surrounded by four bodies of water: the Arctic Ocean, the Greenland Sea to its west, the Barents Sea to the east and the Norwegian Sea to the south.
The archipelago is dominated by rugged mountains, deeply indented fjords and numerous glaciers. The colourful shades of green in the waters along the coasts are likely due to sediment discharges, eroded by the flow of ice and then carried by meltwater into the sea.
Nine main islands make up the archipelago, which covers a total area of around 62 700 sq km. The largest is Spitsbergen, visible here in the left of the image, followed by Nordaustlandet to its top right, mainly covered by large ice caps, Edgeøya at the bottom right, and Barentsøya, north of Edgeøya.
Spitsbergen, which is around the same size as Switzerland, has a mountainous landscape, with elongated valleys and a jagged western coastline, shaped by glacial erosion and marine incursion. Its highest point is Mount Newton, around 1717 m, in the northeast.
Opening on Spitsbergen’s north coast is Wijdefjorden, the longest fjord of the archipelago. It runs 108 km southwards, separating Andrée Land in the west from Margaretas Land in the east.
Spitsbergen is the only permanently populated island of the archipelago and Longyearbyen is the largest settlement. Near Longyearbyen sits the Svalbard Satellite Station – SvalSat for short. Its position enables it to track all 14 daily passes of polar-orbiting satellites. It has worked with a range of Earth observation missions including Aeolus, Swarm, CryoSat and Copernicus Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3.
This image was generated using multiple scans captured by Copernicus Sentinel-2 between June and September 2024. By choosing the cloud-free pixels over a long period of time, such clear, high-resolution mosaics can be created, which are especially valuable to overcome the persistent challenges of limited visibility, due to cloud cover and polar night, in the Svalbard area.
These multitemporal composites optimise land cover classification, glacier boundary delineation and vegetation mapping in the short Arctic summer. Additionally, the frequent revisit time of Sentinel-2 – up to every five days at mid-latitudes – allows researchers to build detailed annual or seasonal composites, enabling consistent monitoring of environmental changes across the archipelago.
