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The Musaicum East Africa
The Musaicum East Africa is a regional visible color satellite image mosaic of East Africa with a ground resolution of 10m. It combines recent Sentinel-2 satellite imagery into the highest quality and most cloud free depiction of the region in this resolution class available today.
Coverage includes Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.
It is generated using a classical mosaicing process derived from the methods and techniques developed for local mosaics, but with a high degree of automatization. This eliminates most of the time intensive manual steps, while maintaining high quality standards.
Compared to the Green Marble, the Musaicum East Africa offers much higher spatial resolution (10m compared to 250/300m) at the cost of slightly more heterogeneous coloring due to the smaller data basis. Cloud occurrence is comparable to my hand produced local mosaics with less than about one in 100k pixels significantly affected by clouds.
Compared to the Musaicum EU-Plus, the Musaicum West Asia and the Musaicum United States, aggregation techniques have been further improved, in particular regarding the different climate of the region.
Primary data source for the image is Sentinel-2 imagery from 2021 to 2026, in smaller parts also from 2016 to 2020. In a very small area of the Rwenzori mountains also Landsat images from 2024 and 2025 have been used. This accounts for less than one percent of a single MGRS tile.
In case you would like to read in more detail about this mosaic off-line a product description is available for download and offline reading as well.
Key properties
- Visible color mosaic of East Africa including Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda
- 10m base resolution
- Based on Sentinel-2 data from 2016 to 2026
- Includes full coverage of smaller lakes and coastal waters, no coverage of the open ocean and a few larger lakes (in particular Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika)
- Shows atmosphere compensated surface color, available either as linear surface reflectance values or tone mapped for direct display
- Available with illumination as recorded and with shading compensation
Product packaging
The mosaic is produced in different projections for different parts of the coverage area and is assembled in the target projection on demand. The previews of the whole mosaic shown here are in Lambert conformal conic projection. For use in web maps in Mercator projection by default a z14 grid (9.5546m nominal resolution) is provided.
The standard form of distribution of this mosaic is with an alpha channel for seamless blending with a background image for the open ocean - like the Green Marble. This is illustrated in the samples below. Other variants can be produced on request.
Product options
In addition to the mosaic with illumination as recorded - which is the recommended version for direct visual applications - this mosaic is also available in a shading compensated version, where the differences in illumination due to the topography and shadows cast by mountains are compensated for. This version can be used, for example, in applications where a synthetic illumination is used to generate a custom shading effect.
Supplementary to the visual color mosaic a vegetation data set is available with the same coverage and source data, documenting the fractional herbaceous and woody vegetation as well as fractional water cover for every 10m pixel.
Sample gallery
Musaicum East Africa license inquiry
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