Read on Reddit about the massive wildfire in the Mongolia-China border (it’s barely made any headlines on this side of the world), so I had to check for myself: over 500,000 hectares of steppe burnt according to Mongolia, 80% of the Nömrög Protected Area.

Sentinel-2 true colour, 18 days apart, 10 to 40m.

From what I see, quality control on commercial satellite imagery mostly happens on the provider side, through their calibration, validation and metadata. On the user side, it seems to come down to manual spot checks on the vendor imagery.

I’m curious how others usually handle it. Do you check things like gaps, geolocation accuracy or cloud masks yourself, or mostly trust what the provider delivers?