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

Zacharie Barrou Dumont (1) , Simon Gascoin (1) , Olivier Hagolle (1) , Michaël Ablain , Rémi Jugier , Germain Salgues , Florence Marti , Aurore Dupuis (2) , Marie Dumont (3) , Samuel Morin (3)

1 CESBIO - Centre d'études spatiales de la biosphère
2 CNES - Centre National d'Études Spatiales [Toulouse]
3 CNRM - Centre national de recherches météorologiques

The High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service was launched in 2020 to provide near-real-time, pan-European snow and ice information at 20 m 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).

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]

Zacharie Barrou Dumont, Simon Gascoin, Olivier Hagolle, Michaël Ablain, Rémi Jugier, et al.. Brief communication: Evaluation of the snow cover detection in the Copernicus High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service. The Cryosphere, 2021, 15 (10), pp.4975-4980. ⟨10.5194/tc-15-4975-2021⟩. ⟨insu-03668278⟩