The Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance data set T a,b,⁎...

Claverie, M., J. Ju, J. G. Masek, J. L. Dungan, E. F. Vermote, J. Roger, S. V. Skakun, and C. Justice (2018), The Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 surface reflectance data set T a,b,⁎ b,c b d b, Remote Sensing of Environment, 219, 145-161, doi:10.1016/j.rse.2018.09.002.
Abstract: 

The Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) project is a NASA initiative aiming to produce a Virtual Constellation (VC) of surface reflectance (SR) data acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) aboard Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 remote sensing satellites, respectively. The HLS products are based on a set of algorithms to obtain seamless products from both sensors (OLI and MSI): atmospheric correction, cloud and cloud-shadow masking, spatial co-registration and common gridding, bidirectional reflectance distribution function normalization and spectral bandpass adjustment. Three products are derived from the HLS processing chain: (i) S10: full resolution MSI SR at 10 m, 20 m and 60 m spatial resolutions; (ii) S30: a 30 m MSI Nadir BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function)-Adjusted Reflectance (NBAR); (iii) L30: a 30 m OLI NBAR. All three products are processed for every Level-1 input products from Landsat 8/OLI (L1T) and Sentinel-2/MSI (L1C). As of version 1.3, the HLS data set covers 10.35 million km2 and spans from first Landsat 8 data (2013); Sentinel-2 data spans from October 2015.

The L30 and S30 show a good consistency with coarse spatial resolution products, in particular MODIS Collection 6 MCD09CMG products (overall deviations do not exceed 11%) that are used as a reference for quality assurance. The spatial co-registration of the HLS is improved compared to original Landsat 8 L1T and Sentinel2A L1C products, for which misregistration issues between multi-temporal data are known. In particular, the resulting computed circular errors at 90% for the HLS product are 6.2 m and 18.8 m, for S10 and L30 products, respectively. The main known issue of the current data set remains the Sentinel-2 cloud mask with many cloud detection omissions. The cross-comparison with MODIS was used to flag products with most evident non-detected clouds. A time series outlier filtering approach is suggested to detect remaining clouds. Finally, several time series are presented to highlight the high potential of the HLS data set for crop monitoring.

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