How can space agencies provide rigorous and traceable uncertainty estimates of their operational products?

Javier is currently an ESA Living Planet Fellow at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). His work intiated at ESA and continued at the National Physical Laboratory where he obtained a Ph.D. (2018) from the University of Surrey. He has been working on the development of Earth Observation uncertainty products and the calibration of optical sensors in space. His main work has been focused on the Sentinel 2 and TRUTHS missions. His research interest spans from the design and performance of radiometers all the way down to atmosphere and surface reflectance products. In addition, he is also exploring the data quality impact on product benchmarking, retrieval processes and propagation to biophysical models.

Research objectives

The objectives of the L2A_RUT project are:

• Define a mathematical expression for the Sentinel 2 L2A products.
• Derive an uncertainty expression for the Sentinel 2 L2A products
• Estimate the value associated to each uncertainty contribution associated to the Sentinel 2 L2A products.
• Validate the uncertainty estimates of Sentinel 2 L2A products against a Monte-Carlo approach.
• Study in detail the auxiliary retrievals such as Aerosol Optical Thickness (AOT) and Water Vapour (WV) in Sen2Cor processor and provide mathematical and/or alternative solution to define their uncertainty.
• Upgrade the Radiometric Uncertainty tool (RUT) to deliver both S2 L1C and L2A uncertainty estimates.
• Define study cases that show the benefit of uncertainty products in an EO processing chain.

Read more on the research project sheet.