Processing a single Sentinel 2 granule

Hi there,

I often need to download and process only a single Sentinel 2 image tile.

I do the download with the Semi-automatic Classification Plugin in QGIS because it is easy and allows the selection of specific granules. Each granule is downloaded with its xml metadata file.

However, when I try to import the granule in SNAP, it does not recognize its xml metadata file. Probably it requires the xml metadata file of the whole scene.

Does somebody know a turnaround that allows downloading and importing a single Sentinel 2 granule in SNAP in order to process it with sen2cor?

Any help shall be greatly appreciated.

You can open the granules of a full product separately. Just step into the granules folder and open them as the normal product.
Maybe something is going wrong with the xml file in QGIS.

You can download the corresponding product and compare the granules.

Hi Marco,

Thanks for answering my question. One can indeed open a single granule within a whole scene with all its files. However I have copied the folder of 1 single granule outside the whole scene’s folder and and tried to open it with its xml file; it didn’t work unfortunately.

It seems that to open a single granule, SNAP uses other files inside the scene’s folder and ‘knows’ their relative positions.

This is most unfortunate if we always need to download a whole scene to use maybe only 1 or 2 granules.

Is it possible to download the folder of a whole scene but with only selected granules through ESA’s or other servers?

If not, it’s bad for ESA, because of unnecessary extra utilization of its servers, and it is also bad for the user because of extra download time.

Thanks Marco

Abandoned …

Hi There,

It seems that ESA has already considered this issue since starting from October 2016 S2 data shall be packaged in single tiles. Thanks ESA!

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Hello Ghanisen,

Until the new packaging of single tiles, you can also check this post for solutions on downloading single tiles.

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Thanks kraftek. This is very useful.

regards.