Consistency of radiometric satellite data over lakes and coastalwaters with local field measurements

Abstract

The Sentinel-3 mission launched its first satellite Sentinel-3A in 2016 to be followed by Sentinel-3B and Sentinel-3C to provide long-term operational measurements over Earth. Sentinel-3A and 3B are in full operational status, allowing global coverage in less than two days, usable to monitor optical water quality and provide data for environmental studies. However, due to limited ground truth data, the product quality has not yet been analyzed in detail with the fiducial reference measurement (FRM) dataset. Here, we use the fully characterized ground truth FRM dataset for validating Sentinel-3A Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI) radiometric products over optically complex Estonian inland waters and Baltic Sea coastal areas. As consistency between satellite and local data depends on uncertainty in field measurements, filtering of the in situ data has been made based on the uncertainty for the final comparison. We have compared various atmospheric correction methods and found POLYMER (POLYnomial-based algorithm applied to MERIS) to be most suitable for optically complex waters under study in terms of product accuracy, amount of usable data and also being least influenced by the adjacency effect.