File:Alexandra Land and Prince George Land, Arctic Ocean.jpg

English: This False Colour image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2A satellite, shows Alexandra Land and parts of Prince George Land, two islands of the Franz Joseph Land, a Russian archipelago in the north-eastern Barents Sea in the Arctic Ocean. They are located at a latitude above 80° North, about 1,000 kilometers away from the North Pole. In this region, summer thaw usually starts during July, but in 2020 thaw started at the end of June and continued during July, melting ice and snow in a shorter period of time, as a result of the Siberian heatwave. According to the climatologists of the University of Liège, the meltwater runoff had a 1,500% increase between the 1st of June and the 10th of July, compared to the average value of the reference period 1981-2010. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission, composed by two twin satellites, Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B, provides multispectral data thanks to its 13 available spectral bands, with a maximum spatial resolution of 10 metres and an average revisit time of 5 days. In higher latitudes, overlapping swaths can increase the revisit time to up to one image per day. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission has an important role in Arctic research applications, because it allows the retrieval of spectral albedo and the derivation of different snow properties.