Building Synthetic Earth Scenes for the Future of EO

Last week, Rayference participated in the European Space Agency - ESA DigitalTwinEarth Components: Open Science Meeting 2026 in ESRIN - alongside the DTE S2GOS (https://dte-s2gos.rayference.eu/) mid-term review meeting, an important milestone to reflect on progress, alignment, and next steps within the project.

Within this project, and together with our partners from National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Q-ForestLab and Brockmann Consult GmbH, we are working to build synthetic Earth scenes for Earth Observation.

Following the definition of three key use cases, five Regions of Interest (ROIs) have been selected, each with both summer and winter variants, to support the next stage of development:

• Pisa, Italy
• Patagonia National Park, Chile
• Gobabeb, Namibia
• Frascati, Italy
• Kairouan, Tunisia

The video below shows our synthetic Patagonia scene, for both winter and summer season, simulated within S2GOS.

These regions are now being brought to life with S2GOS, enabling the simulation of:

• Sentinel-2/MSI images at 10 m resolution
• CHIME images at 30 m resolution

For some ROIs, we’re also adding very high-resolution subsets where ground observations are available. Future simulations will expand to other instruments, including Sentinel-3/OLCI.

While the ultimate goal is to generate synthetic 3D scenes anywhere on Earth and simulate both ground and satellite observations, these five carefully chosen ROIs provide the foundation for delivering meaningful results in the near term.

Thanks for your interest in the DTE-S2GOS project! Don’t forget to register to our Newsletter to stay informed about DTE-S2GOS ROI development.