EOPF Explorer: Sentinel Pipelines for ESA

What it is #

At Development Seed I work on ESA’s EOPF Explorer, building the pipelines that turn raw Sentinel data into analysis-ready, cloud-native datasets. My work is mostly around three areas: converting Sentinel-2 products into GeoZarr at scale, the operational machinery that keeps a growing catalogue healthy without manual intervention, and a developing the production pipeline to support other Sentinel missions (e.g. Sentinel-1).

Sentinel-2: GeoZarr ingestion at scale #

The backbone of the project is a pipeline that converts Sentinel-2 L2A products into GeoZarr (CF-compliant metadata, multiscale overviews, tuned sharding and compression) and registers each product in a STAC catalogue. This way downstream users can search and open exactly the pixels they need without a bulk download step.

Keeping the catalogue healthy #

The pipelines run on Kubernetes, with Argo Workflows doing the heavy processing and Argo Events triggering runs as new data lands rather than on a fixed schedule. Around that core sits the lifecycle automation a large catalogue needs: automated storage-tier management to keep recent data fast and older data cheap, expiry-driven retention that cleans up transient products on a schedule, and observability tuned so the system only reprocesses what actually changed.

I gave a talk at FOSS4G Europe 2026 on this “self-healing” design: From Cron Job to Self-Healing Pipeline. A companion repository with a runnable version of the pattern is on GitHub: lhoupert/argo-stac-eo-pipeline.

Sentinel-1: radiometric terrain correction #

The newest strand is an RTC pipeline for Sentinel-1 GRD imagery. This MVP to demonstrate how to build multidimensional GeoZarr tiles (time x latitude x longitude) is built on the Orfeo ToolBox and S1Tiling, fetches Copernicus DEM tiles on demand, and is triggered by new acquisitions. It currently covers an area of interest spanning mainland France and the Alps (~160 tiles), appending each acquisition into per-tile datacubes served through TiTiler.

Stack: Kubernetes, Argo Workflows & Events, Zarr, STAC, TiTiler/eoAPI, Python.