Results from the radiometric validation of Sentinel-3 optical sensors using natural targets

The recently launched SENTINEL-3 mission measures sea surface topography, sea/land surface temperature, and ocean/land surface colour with high accuracy. The mission provides data continuity with the ENVISAT mission through acquisitions by multiple sensing instruments. Two of them, OLCI (Ocean and Land Colour Imager) and SLSTR (Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer) are optical sensors designed to provide continuity with Envisat's MERIS and AATSR instruments. During the commissioning, in-orbit calibration and validation activities are conducted. Instruments are in-flight calibrated and characterized primarily using on-board devices which include diffusers and black body. Afterward, vicarious calibration methods are used in order to validate the OLCI and SLSTR radiometry for the reflective bands. The calibration can be checked over dedicated natural targets such as Rayleigh scattering, sunglint, desert sites, Antarctica, and tentatively deep convective clouds. Tools have been developed and/or adapted (S3ETRAC, MUSCLE) to extract and process Sentinel-3 data. Based on these matchups, it is possible to provide an accurate checking of many radiometric aspects such as the absolute and interband calibrations, the trending correction, the calibration consistency within the field-of-view, and more generally this will provide an evaluation of the radiometric consistency for various type of targets. Another important aspect will be the checking of cross-calibration between many other instruments such as MERIS and AATSR (bridge between ENVISAT and Sentinel-3), MODIS (bridge to the GSICS radiometric standard), as well as Sentinel-2 (bridge between Sentinel missions). The early results, based on the available OLCI and SLSTR data, will be presented and discussed.