SENTINEL-2 SURFACE REFLECTANCE PRODUCTS GENERATED BY CNES AND DLR: METHODS, VALIDATION AND APPLICATIONS

Since 2020, the Copernicus High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service has distributed snow cover maps at 20 m resolution over Europe in near-real time. These products are derived from the Sentinel-2 Earth observation mission, with a revisit time of 5 d or less (cloud-permitting). Here we show the good accuracy of the snow detection over a wide range of regions in Europe, except in dense forest regions where the snow cover is hidden by the trees.

There is a good agreement between the MODIS snow products and observations from automatic stations and Landsat snow maps in the Pyrenees. The optimal thresholds for which a MODIS pixel is marked as snow-covered are 40mm in water equivalent and 150mm in snow depth. We generate a gap-filled snow cover climatology for the Pyrenees. We compute the mean snow cover duration by elevation and aspect classes. We show anomalous snow patterns in 2012 and consequences on hydropower production.