What this tool does
Sentinel-2 Grid Explorer is a free, browser-based map of every Sentinel-2 MGRS tile footprint. It answers the everyday questions that come up when planning a Sentinel-2 download: which tile covers my study area?, what are the neighbouring tile IDs?, and how do I get that list of tiles into my processing script?
Nothing is uploaded and no account is needed. The tile geometries are loaded into your browser as a static dataset, and every selection, export, and share link is produced locally on your machine.
Sentinel-2 and the MGRS tiling grid
Sentinel-2 is a wide-swath, high-resolution, multi-spectral Earth observation mission operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of the European Union's Copernicus programme. Its MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) records 13 spectral bands at 10 m, 20 m, and 60 m resolution across a 290 km swath, and the satellite constellation revisits the equator every five days.
Rather than distributing whole orbits, ESA cuts the imagery into fixed tiles so that the same patch of ground always arrives with the same footprint and projection. Those tiles are indexed with the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS): each granule is a 110 km × 110 km ortho-image in the UTM/WGS 84 projection, named after the 100 km MGRS square it sits on. Because the granules are slightly larger than the squares they are named for, adjacent tiles overlap — a point near a tile edge is often present in two or more tiles.
How to read a Sentinel-2 tile ID
A tile ID such as 50HLK packs three pieces of information into five characters:
| Part | Example | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| UTM zone | 50 |
One of the 60 six-degree-wide UTM longitude zones, numbered from 1 at 180° W. |
| Latitude band | H |
An eight-degree latitude band lettered C to X from 80° S to 84° N. The letters I and O are skipped so they cannot be confused with 1 and 0. |
| 100 km square | LK |
Column and row letters identifying the 100 km square within that zone and band. |
So 50HLK is a tile in UTM zone 50, latitude band H — the grid square covering Perth,
Western Australia. In Sentinel-2 product names the identifier is prefixed with T
and appears as the T50HLK component, between the relative orbit number and the
product discriminator.
Using the map
Finding a tile
- Search by ID — type an MGRS identifier such as
01CCVinto the search box at the top left, then pick a result to zoom straight to that tile. - Browse visually — pan and zoom the map. Tile outlines are drawn from zoom level 3, and tile labels appear once you zoom in past level 8.
- Check coverage gaps — the "Coverage Areas" overlay, shown by default and toggled from the layer control, shades regions with no routine Sentinel-2 acquisition, mostly open ocean. The same control switches the basemap between OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery.
Building a selection
- Click a tile to add it to the selection; click it again to remove it.
- Hold Shift and drag a rectangle to select every tile it touches — the quickest way to grab a study area that spans a dozen tiles.
- Hover a footprint to highlight it before committing to the click.
- Use Zoom to selection to frame everything you have picked, or Clear selection to start again.
Getting the selection out
- Copy Names copies just the tile IDs, either one per line or as a
ready-to-paste Python list such as
["50HLK", "50HMK"]. - Download GeoJSON writes a
FeatureCollectionof the selected tile polygons, ready to drop into QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, geopandas, or anogr2ogrpipeline. - Download CSV writes one row per tile with the tile
nameplus itscentroid_latandcentroid_lng— convenient when you only need a list of identifiers and rough locations. - Copy/Share produces a permalink that encodes the selection in the URL, for
example
?grid=50HLKfor a single tile or?grids=50HLK,50HMKfor several. Anyone opening the link sees the same tiles selected.
Common questions
Why do neighbouring tiles overlap?
Sentinel-2 granules are 110 km across but are laid out on a 100 km grid, so each tile carries roughly 10 km of overlap with its neighbours. When you mosaic tiles you will need to decide which one wins in the overlap, and when you count downloads remember that a small area of interest straddling an edge may require several tiles.
Why does one tile ID appear in more than one place?
Tiles that straddle the antimeridian at 180° longitude are split into separate polygons so they draw correctly on a flat map. They are still a single Sentinel-2 tile.
Where do I download the actual imagery?
This tool maps the grid, not the pixels. Once you know your tile IDs, the imagery itself is free and open from the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem, and mirrored by several cloud providers including AWS Open Data, Google Earth Engine, and Microsoft Planetary Computer. Most of those catalogues let you filter directly on the MGRS tile ID.
What is the difference between L1C and L2A?
Both product levels use the same MGRS tiling, so the footprints shown here apply to either. Level-1C is top-of-atmosphere reflectance; Level-2A adds an atmospheric correction to give bottom-of-atmosphere surface reflectance, which is what most land-surface analysis starts from.
Can I use the exported footprints in my own work?
Yes. The tile geometries are derived from ESA's publicly published Sentinel-2 tiling grid, and this tool is released under the MIT licence. Please check ESA's terms if you redistribute the underlying grid itself.
About this project
Sentinel-2 Grid Explorer is built and maintained by the Data Modelling and Analysis team at the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD), Western Australia. It is a static site: HTML, CSS, Leaflet, and two GeoJSON files, with no backend and no tracking.
Source code, issue reporting, and the underlying datasets live in the project repository on GitHub. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome.