Brief communication: Evaluation of the snow cover detection in the Copernicus High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service

Abstract

The High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service was launched in 2020 to provide near-real-time, pan-European snow and ice information at 20m resolution from Sentinel-2 observations. Here we present an evaluation of the snow detection using a database of snow depth observations from 1764 stations across Europe over the hydrological year 2016-2017. We find a good agreement between both datasets with an accuracy (proportion of correct classifications) of 94% and kappa of 0.81. More accurate (+6% kappa) retrievals are obtained by excluding low-quality pixels at the cost of a reduced coverage (-13% data).