An Innovative Method to Retrieve Global Coastal Bathymetry from Sentinel-2

The BathySent project aims at the development of an automated method for mapping coastal bathymetry (water depths) on the basis of Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission. The interest of using Sentinel-2 data lies on the capacity to cover large areas (National and European scale targeted), while benefiting from the high repeat cycle (5 days) of the mission. The systematic acquisition plan of Sentinel-2 is of major interest for studying and monitoring coastal morphodynamics. The proposed methodology avoids limitation of exiting techniques in terms of dependency on water turbidity and requirement for calibration. The main objective of the project is to propose a method for deriving coastal bathymetry on wide areas (National/European scale) based on Sentinel-2 data and assess its performances. Today knowledge of near-shore bathymetry is essential for multiple applications such as for the study of submarine morphodynamics. These data are vital for planning sustainable coastal development, coastal risks assessments (including tsunamis) and conservation of submarines ecosystems. Moreover, they represent a crucial input for near-shore navigation and submarine resources exploration.