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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Beltsville, Maryland (BARC) » Beltsville Agricultural Research Center » Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #401293
Research Project: From Field to Watershed: Enhancing Water Quality and Management in Agroecosystems through Remote Sensing, Ground Measurements, and Integrative Modeling

Location: Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory

Title: Surface Albedo VALidation (SALVAL) platform: towards CEOS LPV validation stage 4. Application to three global al-bedo climate data records

Author
item SANCHEZ-ZAPERO, J. - Universidad De Valencia
item MARTINEZ-SANCHEZ, E. - Universidad De Valencia
item CAMACHO, F. - Universidad De Valencia
item WANG, Z - Tsinghua University
item CARRER, D. - National Centre For Meteorological Research, Cnrm
item SCHAAF, C. - University Of Massachusetts
item GARCIA-HARO, F. - Universidad De Valencia
item NICKESON, J. - Goddard Space Flight Center
item Cosh, Michael

Submitted to: Remote Sensing
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 2/1/2023
Publication Date: 2/16/2023
Citation: Sanchez-Zapero, J., Martinez-Sanchez, E., Camacho, F., Wang, Z., Carrer, D., Schaaf, C., Garcia-Haro, F., Nickeson, J., Cosh, M.H. 2023. Surface Albedo VALidation (SALVAL) platform: towards CEOS LPV validation stage 4. Application to three global albedo climate data records. Remote Sensing. 15:1081. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15041081.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs15041081

Interpretive Summary: Surface albedo is the fraction of the sunlight that is reflected by the earth’s surface and it critical to understanding the energy and water cycles of the earth. Many products are developed to estimate surface albedo, but a thorough evaluation of new products requires a systematic tool so there is a common reference point for performance and skill. Such as tool has been developed and is available at the European Space Agency Cal/Val portal. This work has been under development at the international coordination group on land product validation and this marks the final stage of development for such land products.

Technical Abstract: The Surface Albedo VALidation (SALVAL) online platform is designed to allow producers of satellite-based albedo products to move to operational validation systems. The SALVAL tool in-tegrates long-term satellite products, global in situ datasets and community-agreed upon validation protocols into an online and interactive platform. The SALVAL tool, available on the ESA Cal/Val portal, was developed by EOLAB under the framework outlined by the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) Working Group on Calibration and Validation (WGCV) Land Product Validation (LPV) subgroup, and provides transparency, consistency, and traceability to the validation process. In this demonstration, three satellite-based albedo climate data records from different operational services were validated and intercompared using the SALVAL platform: 1) the Climate Change Service (C3S) multi-sensor product, 2) the NASA MODIS MCD43A3 product (C6.1) and 3) Beijing Normal University’s Global LAnd Surface Satellites (GLASS) version 4 products. This work demonstrates that the three satellite albedo datasets are consistent at the global scale, with similar uncertainties (RMSD = 0.03), when comparing the best quality retrievals with ground measurements. The SALVAL platform has proven to be a useful tool to validate and intercompare albedo datasets, allowing them to reach stage 4 of the CEOS LPV validation hierarchy.