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

• Published in: The Cryosphere
• Main Authors: Barrou Dumont, Zacharie, Gascoin, Simon, Hagolle, Olivier, Ablain, Michaël, Jugier, Rémi, Salgues, Germain, Marti, Florence, Dupuis, Aurore, Dumont, Marie, Morin, Samuel
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2021
• Subjects: article; Verlagsveröffentlichung; The Cryosphere
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-15-4975-2021; https://noa.gwlb.de/receive/cop_mods_00058537; https://noa.gwlb.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/cop_derivate_00058169/tc-15-4975-2021.pdf; https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/15/4975/2021/tc-15-4975-2021.pdf

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).