Validation for Land S3 Products

Started in January 2020 for a 2-year period, the “Copernicus Space Component Validation for Land Surface Temperature, Aerosol Optical Depth and Water Vapor Sentinel-3 Products” (referenced in the following by “LAW”) is a project managed by ESA/ESRIN.

This project aims to perform a more extensive and systematic validation against ground-based measurements of three Sentinel 3 datasets: the Integrated Water Vapor included in OL_2_LFR products, Aerosol Optical Depth included in SY_2_AOD products and Land Surface Temperature provided by SL_2_LST products. This validation is followed by an analysis phase to better identify areas where products are limited algorithm evolutions and improvements increasing the quality of these products.

A preliminary analysis of the available ground-based measurements showed a gap in the LST networks, in particular regarding the biome distribution. To foster the validation of LST against a wider variety of stations, five new LST stations have been deployed in the frame of the LAW project.

Matchups between these new LST ground-based measurements and S3 products, but also matchups between existing AOD and IWV in-situ measurements and S3 products have been computed all along the project and are accessible to public via this website (see data access panel). Project documentation and Validation reports are available on this web portal.

The AOD and IWV activities, including validation and analysis phase, have been ended in December 2021 with the publication of the consolidated validation reports. All matchups created during these two years are still available on the data access page. The creation of matchups will also be pursued in 2022.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the deployment of LST stations have been delayed and, as consequences, the LST validation phase only started in January 2022. Preliminary results and associated matchups will be displayed on this website all along 2022.

The LAW consortium is composed of ACRI-ST, also acting as the prime contractor, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), the SWANSEA University, the University of Leicester, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Spectral Earth.