Evaluation of SEN2COR surface reflectance products over land surface with reference measurements on ground

Kurzfassung

Sen2Cor is the atmospheric correction processor selected by ESA for operational, systematic processing of Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission data. It is used for generating the Level 2A products distributed to users by the Copernicus SciHub. Accurate atmospheric correction of Sentinel-2 data and knowledge of its uncertainties are preconditions for high quality downstream applications. In this work we present the comparison of Sentinel-2 Bottom-of-Atmosphere products with measurements of surface reflectance on ground. Source of reference measurements are both surface reflectance data from RadCalNet and from dedicated field campaigns. The analysis shows, that the uncertainty of SR-retrieval with Sen2Cor is better than about 7% for bright surfaces and about 17% for darker. In addition to this performance evaluation, the data are also applied to compare the use of reference data coming from permanent operating bright RadCalNet sites and from ad-hoc field campaigns at darker sites.