WP4 - Products and Services Validation

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Objectives

- To design and report uniform validation schemes and accuracy reporting for different satellite products applying QA4EO framework
- To implement automated or semi-automated and traditional validation protocols for rapid up-take of Sentinel satellite products
- To report on the accuracy of Sentinel- products
- To report the overall SEN3APP service reliability and availability

Description of work and role of partners

WP4 - Products and Services Validation [Months: 12-33]

Lead beneficiary: SYKE
This work package is divided into same application areas as WP3: land cover change and phenology; snow; glaciers; lake ice; mapping of water bodies; frozen soil. It focuses on validation including i) qualitative/quantitative assessment of the accuracy of the product related to the algorithm performance and ii) assessment of the technical quality of the service in terms of timelines, handling of failures etc.

T4.1 - Validation schemes definition for Sentinel satellite products [Months: 12-18]

SYKE, FMI, GAMMA, ENVEO, VTT
Define uniform validation schemes for the satellite products using the QA4EO framework as starting point and specify the statistical measures.

T4.2 - Validation of land cover change and phenology products [Months: 18-33]

VTT, SYKE
Validation of change detection based on Sentinel-3 OLCI and Sentinel-2 MSI is made by making reference change detection using better resolution EO-images and comparing them. Establishment of validation methodology for start and end of growing season for different land cover classes based on CO2 flux measurements in different ecosystems (evergreen coniferous forest, deciduous broadleaved, and wetland areas), phenological observations and NRT web-camera observations.

T4.3 - Validation of snow products [Months: 18-33]

SYKE, FMI, ENVEO
Validate the Sentinel- satellite based snow products. Implement an automated validation process for FSC product using the operational snow course network of SYKE. Investigation on feasibility of using of in-situ NRT weather station data (Snow depth) for NRT-validation.

T4.4 - Validation of glacier products [Months: 18-33]

ENVEO, GAMMA
Selection of test glaciers with suitable validation data (e.g. in-situ measurements; coincidently acquired very high resolution data) and compilation of validation data sets. Validation and inter-comparison of glacier products from Sentinel data with validation data sets for specification of product performance.

T4.5 - Validation of lake ice products [Months: 18-33]

FMI, SYKE
Lake ice product validation will be based on comparative analysis on between the FSC on lake ice from Sentinel-2 MSI and the three category classification from Sentinel-3 SLSTR.

T4.6 - Validation of frozen soil products [Months: 18-33]

FMI, GAMMA
Validate the Sentinel based soil products. Investigate the feasibility of automated/semi-automated validation of freeze/thaw satellite product.

T4.7 - SEN3APP system validation [Months: 18-33]

FMI, ENVEO, SYKE
Validate SEN3APP system by defining and monitoring the reliability and availability targets of different parts of the service chains. This includes e.g. monitoring the performance measures (delivery frequency, timeliness) and service accessibility. Additionally risk assessments of failures are prepared.