SY-4Sci Synergy Study 2

Building upon the work undertaken in OPTIRAD, this project extends the capabilities of the system to include observation operators in the thermal part of the spectrum. Components will be added to the system to incorporate the functions of the SCOPE radiative transfer model. This will allow the informal from the thermal domain from Sentinel-3 to be combined with the high spectral resolution visible and near infrared information from Sentinel-2. The project will also implement a series of efficiency improvements to the algorithms to speed up the processing, as the current version is very compute intensive. Coarse resolution optical data (e.g. S3/SLTSR, S3/OLCI, MODIS) are used to provide an expectation of surface reflectance that is used to enhance high resolution (e.g. S2/MSI, Landsat) atmospheric correction and cloud screening. Coarse resolution data is used to estimate bi-hemispherical reflectance, and this is used with a radiative transfer model to infer coarse resolution biophysical parameters (e.g. LAI, soil albedo, fAPAR). Coarse resolution biophysical parameters are used as prior distributions to the same RT model now extended to work in the thermal infrared (e.g. S3/SLSTR) and used to invert thermal brightness temperatures to produce Land Surface Temperature (LST). The coarse resolution biophysical parameters are also used as priors for higher resolution biophysical parameter retrievals