Exploring Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines: Discover the Beauty from Above

The false-color composite image from Copernicus Sentinel-2 highlights the Nueva Vizcaya Province in the Philippines, characterized by its agricultural and urban landscape. The image paints a picture of different seasons through various colors, providing insight into various stages of crop growth, rice fields submerged in water, and the progress of urban development. The image is crafted from altered Copernicus Sentinel data (2022-2023), processed by ESA, under the license CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

The Nueva Vizcaya Province, situated in Luzon— the largest and most densely populated island in the Philippines is clearly visible in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 false-color satellite image.

The variety of colors displayed in the image stems from it being a composite brought to life through three separate images from Copernicus Sentinel-2, obtained with the near-infrared channel of the mission over ten months. Each capture is represented by a unique color; May 2022's hot dry season represented in red, the wet season of September 2022 in green, and the cool dry season of March 2023 in blue.

This color-coded presentation accentuates various features such as types of crops and disparities between images, indicative of different stages of crop growth.

A collage of vibrant agricultural fields can be observed at the center bottom-left portion of the image. The red and green areas signify plant growth in May and September, respectively, with blue-dominated sections representing plant growth that happened majorly in March's cool dry season.

Most of the fields are maintained waterlogged throughout the year, probably for high-scale rice production, separate by canals. Dense vegetation cover is indicated by bright white areas situated in the middle of fields.

Urban areas and roads are represented through grey areas and straight lines. Among these are Solano, the largest town in Nueva Vizcaya, seen at the bottom left surrounded by blue fields and southward, Bayombong, the capital of the province.

The dark winding lines stand for rivers, with Magat River, the biggest, moving in a north-easterly direction throughout the image. A closer look reveals different colors along the river's course, possibly a result of changes in water volume and the river's path during different seasons.

Copernicus Sentinel-2 is equipped with 13 spectral channels, designed to supply data useful for monitoring and mapping croplands. The mission's high spatial resolution and regular revisits facilitate close monitoring of changes to inland water bodies.

In January 2023, the European Commission and ESA agreed to establish the first-of-its-kind Copernicus mirror site in Southeast Asia, specifically in the Philippines. This fresh initiative will amplify the Philippines' disaster response capability and resilience to human-made and natural calamities via strategic use of space data.