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Bands and the crosswalk

You can name a band two ways:

  • by its STAC common name, such as red or nir08, which means the same thing on every sensor, or
  • by its native name, such as B04 on Sentinel-2 or SR_B4 on Landsat 8 and 9, which only makes sense within one collection.

Both resolve, per the crosswalk below. Common names are the safer choice: the same request then works on Sentinel-2 and Landsat.

The crosswalk

Section titled “The crosswalk”

Available now for Sentinel-2 L2A and Landsat 8-9. The other columns are coming later with their collections.

Common name Sentinel-2 L2A Landsat 8-9 OLI Landsat 7 ETM+ Landsat 4-5 TM HLS
blue B02 SR_B2 SR_B1 SR_B1 Blue
green B03 SR_B3 SR_B2 SR_B2 Green
red B04 SR_B4 SR_B3 SR_B3 Red
nir08 B8A SR_B5 SR_B4 SR_B4 NIR_Narrow
swir16 B11 SR_B6 SR_B5 SR_B5 SWIR1
swir22 B12 SR_B7 SR_B7 SR_B7 SWIR2

The B08 trap

Section titled “The B08 trap”

Sentinel-2 has two near-infrared bands:

  • B08 is the broad 10 m NIR band. Its common name is nir. It has no Landsat equivalent.
  • B8A is the narrow 20 m NIR band. Its common name is nir08. It matches Landsat OLI band 5.

For anything that compares Sentinel-2 with Landsat, such as NDVI over both, use nir08. Using B08 on Sentinel-2 and SR_B5 on Landsat mixes two different bands. (Planetary Computer labels B8A as a red-edge band; satellitedata.net follows Earth Search and the HLS recipe.)

Sentinel-2 L2A bands

Section titled “Sentinel-2 L2A bands”
Native Common name Resolution Other names that resolve
B01 coastal 60 m CoastalAerosol
B02 blue 10 m B2
B03 green 10 m B3
B04 red 10 m B4
B05 rededge071 20 m rededge1, RedEdge1
B06 rededge075 20 m rededge2, RedEdge2
B07 rededge078 20 m rededge3, RedEdge3
B08 nir 10 m NIR_Broad, B8
B8A nir08 20 m NIR_Narrow
B09 nir09 60 m WaterVapor
B11 swir16 20 m SWIR1
B12 swir22 20 m SWIR2
SCL 20 m scl (scene classification)
AOT 20 m aot (aerosol optical thickness)
WVP 20 m wvp (water vapour)
CLD 20 m cloud, MSK_CLDPRB (cloud probability)
SNW 20 m snow, MSK_SNWPRB (snow probability)

Landsat 8-9 Level-2 bands

Section titled “Landsat 8-9 Level-2 bands”
Native Common name Resolution Other names that resolve
SR_B1 coastal 30 m B01
SR_B2 blue 30 m B02
SR_B3 green 30 m B03
SR_B4 red 30 m B04
SR_B5 nir08 30 m B05
SR_B6 swir16 30 m B06
SR_B7 swir22 30 m B07
ST_B10 lwir11 30 m (acquired at 100 m) B10
QA_PIXEL 30 m qa_pixel, BQA
QA_RADSAT 30 m qa_radsat
SR_QA_AEROSOL 30 m qa_aerosol
ST_QA, ST_EMIS, ST_ATRAN, ST_CDIST 30 m lwir_qa, emis, atran, cdist

Some Landsat scenes carry no thermal band (surface-reflectance-only L2SR scenes, and some Tier 2 scenes). Prefer lwir11 over ST_B10: Landsat Collection 3 renames surface temperature, and the common name will keep working.

In lean v1 outputs

Section titled “In lean v1 outputs”
  • POST /v1/process resolves every name above, case-insensitively. A name the collection lacks fails with 422 unknown-band and a list of close names. The pseudo-bands of the unified mask fail the same way until the mask ships.
  • The GeoTIFF’s band descriptions are Earth Search asset keys, such as red, nir08, nir, scl and qa_pixel, whichever name you asked with.
  • The map presets use Sentinel-2’s nir (B08), not nir08, as the web map does; see Presets.

Resampling

Section titled “Resampling”

Bands of different resolution are resampled to one output grid with nearest neighbour. Without a size or resolution, the grid is the collection’s finest resolution, 10 m for Sentinel-2 and 30 m for Landsat.

Coming later

Section titled “Coming later”
  • On the virtual optical-sr collection only the six cross-sensor common names resolve, because a native name means nothing across sensors. A request for nir there fails with unknown-band and a detail suggesting nir08.
  • Pseudo-bands mask, mask_class and dataMask from the unified cloud mask, and cloud_probability on Sentinel-2.
  • Response metadata that records which native band each common name resolved to on each scene.

The machine-readable crosswalk, with wavelengths, scales and offsets, is in GET /v1/schema.