Open data

One Vidarbha field, every satellite pass for a year.

The real Sentinel-2 record behind the field on our site: 91 passes from 7 Oct 2025 to 12 Oct 2026, 56 of them clear. Free to use under CC BY 4.0, for research, teaching, journalism or your own analysis.

Download CSV JSON with metadata

Whose field is this? We picked it from public satellite imagery because it is a compact block that stayed green through the dry months. We do not know who owns or farms it, and we do not name anyone. The location is published to about 100 m and the exact boundary is withheld; the outlines on our images are drawn for illustration. No message has been sent about this field: it is a public example, not a field we advise.

The files

What you can download.

katol-field-ndvi-2025-2026.csv: One row per Sentinel-2 pass (91 rows): date, scene id, whole-scene cloud cover, the share of the field usable that day, the field's mean NDVI, the median NDVI of the fields within about 500 m, and a status: clear, field_not_clear or excluded_suspected_haze.
katol-field-ndvi-2025-2026.json: The same rows, plus the full metadata: method, column definitions, licence, attribution and counts.
katol-field-passes-monsoon-2026.csv: The 15 passes from 17 Aug to 12 Oct 2026, with whole-scene cloud cover and whether the field itself was clear. Only 5 were.

What it shows

Three things you can check yourself.

Whole-scene cloud cover is a poor guide to one field. On 21 December 2025 the scene was 47.5% cloud and the field was fully clear. On 5 January 2026 the scene was 1.6% cloud and none of the field was usable. Compare the scene_cloud_pct and field_valid_fraction columns.
The monsoon hides fields. In 15 passes over eight monsoon weeks, the field was clear on 5. Optical satellites alone leave weeks with no view.
A field can fall faster than its neighbours. Between 10 and 20 May 2026 the field's NDVI fell from 0.61 to 0.38 (38%), while the median of the fields around it fell 22%.

Method

How each number was made.

Source. Sentinel-2 Level-2A surface reflectance from the free Sentinel-2 Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs on AWS (Element 84 Earth Search), tile 44QKJ (plus tile 43QHD for 28 August 2026, a pass only that overlapping tile recorded), every pass from 7 Oct 2025 to 12 Oct 2026, whatever its cloud cover. Where two scenes share a date, the one with less cloud is kept.

The field. A 3.2-acre block (1.29 ha, 129 pixels of 10 m) near Katol that stayed green through February and May, typical of an irrigated orchard. The crop has not been confirmed on the ground. The location is given to about 100 m; the exact boundary is withheld to protect the landholder's privacy.

Field NDVI. (B08 − B04) / (B08 + B04), averaged over the field's pixels that the scene classification layer marks as vegetation or bare soil (classes 4 and 5). A pass counts as clear only when at least 90% of the field is usable.

Neighbourhood. The median NDVI of usable vegetated pixels within about 500 m of the field.

Haze check. A clear reading more than 0.10 below the median of the two clear readings on each side is marked excluded_suspected_haze (3 passes). Those rows are kept in the file so you can judge them yourself.

Reproduce it. The method is open source (MIT): sentinel2-field-ndvi on GitHub, a short Python script and a notebook that build the same series for any field polygon, straight from the Sentinel-2 files on AWS.

Not included. No ground measurements, no crop yield and no advice. This is the satellite record only.

Licence and citation

Use it freely. Credit it like this.

The data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercial use, with this credit:

VarshaKrishi open data (https://www.varshakrishi.com/open-data). Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel-2 data 2025-2026.

To show the field image on your page

Copy this snippet. It shows the true-colour image of the area around the field with the credit and a link back to this page.

<figure>
  <img src="https://www.varshakrishi.com/images/press/katol-field-true-colour-2026-10-12.jpg"
       alt="Sentinel-2 true-colour image of farmland near Katol, Nagpur district, 12 October 2026"
       width="1200" height="900" loading="lazy">
  <figcaption>Farmland near Katol, 12 Oct 2026. Source:
    <a href="https://www.varshakrishi.com/open-data">VarshaKrishi open data</a>.
    Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel-2 data 2026.</figcaption>
</figure>

More images, the logo and a short film are on the press page. Questions or a dataset you would like to see next: contact@varshakrishi.com.