[GIS] Why does the rainbow airplane stripes appearing on Sentinel 2 image

Question

I have downloaded a Sentinel-2 scene and there are some interesting rainbow like stripes trailing an airplane. This is an rgb image but the stripes are also visible on the other bands. You can tell it is an airplane stripe because there is a very clear airplane symbol in front of the stripes. What interests me is that there are more than two bands visible, although the airplane should only have two trailing stripes. So the airplane is in different positions on different bands.

Any idea how it is possible these airplane stripes could have been formed?

Answer 1

A few months ago I wrote a technical blog post (Planespotting) on intra-detector parallax effects in Sentinel-2 imagery, which can cause aircraft contrails to appear as rainbow stripes. The post also discusses inter-detector parallax effect and motion effects, which also can cause color shifts.

Here is a summary of intra-detector spectral band parallax:

1. the Sentinel-2 detectors use a stripe filter to separate incoming light into distinct spectral channels,
2. the angular separation of the channels requires the satellite to move in order to see the same point on the Earth's surface in multiple spectral channels, and
3. the Sentinel-2 ground processing system uses the elevation of the ground to form the image, causing objects located above the ground surface (such as aircraft) to appear displaced when comparing different spectral channels.

Here is an illustration of the effect, courtesy of Don McCurdy: