Sentinel Hub QGIS Plugin
The Sentinel Hub QGIS plugin (QGIS plugin) allows you to bring satellite imagery directly into your GIS. You can compare imagery directly with your GIS data to evaluate accuracy, detect change, assess land cover based on time series and more. Use your Sentinel Hub account for authentication and additional data.
The QGIS plugin allows you to view satellite image data from Sentinel Hub directly within a QGIS workspace. All datasets are available that are part of collections associated to your user, including commercial data within Sentinel Hub subscriptions and Bring Your Own COG datasets. The current functionality of the QGIS plugin is for visualization, it does not allow you to perform operations or access properties of the dataset. For individual downloads, we recommend the Sentinel Hub Browser, for downloading multiple datasets for an area and time period of interest in a graphical interface, Requests Builder is the optimal tool.
First step: authentication
Before you start, you need to have an OAuth client prepared in your Sentinel Hub Services Dashboard. This serves as your authentication to these services when you log in.
Registering OAuth client
To register an OAuth client, open the User Settings tab in your dashboard, then click the Create new button (1) in the OAuth client section. Give your OAuth client a name (2), set the Client grant type to Client Credentials, and click the Create client button (3). Your client secret will be displayed.
Copy the secret value (4) and paste it locally, as it will not be visible after the pop-up window closes! When you are finished, click Close (5). You should now see the newly created OAuth client name and ID (6) in the list of your OAuth clients.
You can install the plugin from the QGIS plugin repository. Select Plugins/Manage and Install Plugins from the main menu in QGIS and use the search box to find the SentinelHub plugin, click Install Plugin and you are done.
On the login tab, for service URL, select https://services.sentinel-hub.com for Sentinel Hub Services. Copy the client ID and secret to the form – these will be remembered next time you launch QGIS.
Creating a configuration
On left panel of the Sentinel Hub Services dashboard, select Configuration Utility. Here you will see a list of all configurations you created earlier. You can create a new one with the New configuration button (1). For a new configuration, you first have to create a name (2), then the option is offered to create the configuration based on one of the existing instances by changing the settings (3). Clicking Create configuration (4) takes you to the settings of the configuration.
The Warnings switch decides whether you will see a warning message if you want to show or download an area larger than the limit. Show logo does not affect your QGIS plugin, there is a switch for this on the download panel of the plugin where you can decide. Don’t switch Disable OGC requests on if you are creating a configuration you want to access in QGIS – the plugin is based on OGC requests!
Image quality for visualization can be set using the slider or numerically, and the boundaries of the dataset can be selected in a small map window (Map bounds). Under Advanced settings, a window opens where you can edit a JSON configuration.
The New Layer button takes you to the form for setting the data layers in your configuration. Here you can prepare the dataset you want to view in QGIS. First, add a Name for your layer. Choose an imagery data Source from the Collections available, add a Data Processing evalscript – the pencil icon opens a panel where you can select from predefined evalscripts or edit your own, optionally based on the Custom script repository. By defining a Time range and a Cloud coverage threshold, you can filter the imagery to include, additionally setting the Mosaic order (most recent, first, least cloudy) to your preferences. For one configuration, you can create several layers that will be available as options in QGIS.
Using the Plugin – Creating and updating a data layer
On the Create tab, you can select a Configuration. The configurations available in your dashboard are listed here. These can be used to choose between configurations of different data sources (eg. Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3) or different evalscript settings.
Select Service type based on the data you want to use. You typically will need WMS for this case, since the images are in raster format, but WMTS and WFS services are also available if you want to perform more advanced queries or bring your own areas of interest.
The Layer menu allows you to select between the different visualization layers included in your configuration. For the default Sentinel-2 configuration, this menu includes a wide range of visualization options similar to the Sentinel Hub Browser.
CRS refers to Coordinate Reference System, this is where you can set the coordinate system of the dataset. For Sentinel Hub imagery data layers, this should keep the default value of EPSG:3857.
In the Time range bar and the calendar panel, you can choose the start and end date of the period of interest, and set an Image Priority order for mosaicking the data layers for this period. Alternatively, if you are interested in images for specific dates, tick Use exact date to disable mosaicking. Calendar dates where an image is available within the selected Cloud Cover ratio for the onscreen area will be highlighted. You can set the Cloud Cover threshold using the slider below the calendar. If you are using mosaicking within a time range, the Image Priority can be set using the dropdown menu, to include the most recent, the first or the least cloudy image of the time range in the mosaic for each pixel.
Once this is set, you can decide whether to Create a new WMS layer in your QGIS workspace, or update an existing one. Take care – the “update existing layer” dropdown is set by default to the selected layer. If you want to look at a different date, click on the date in the calendar and update the layer. If you want to compare, create a new layer for the new date, and you can use QGIS visualization tools such as transparency.
Downloading imagery
On the Download panel, you can download a three-channel RGB rendering of the image on your map window. File format and image resolution can be selected, and optionally a custom bounding box can be added with coordinates.
