Collection 3.0 of Sentinel-3 NRT Level 2 aerosol product released soon

Key evolutions include:

• Much improved detection of all aerosol episodes (low/medium/high) over all water surfaces, leading to enhanced ocean coverage.
• Aerosol retrieval, for the first time, over all large and dark inland water bodies (such as dust transport over the Caspian Sea or fire smoke transport over American lakes).
• Use of new probabilistic cloud and aerosol detection scheme (called Naïve Probabilistic).
• Improved accuracy of the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) at 550nm above land areas, leading to bias reduction from ~0.1 to ~0.05, thanks to major improvements in surface modelling for both bare soils and vegetated lands.
• Design and implementation of a new Quality Indicator (QI) ranking system for each pixel retrieval (1= poor, 2= good, 3= very good).

These evolutions follow feedback from operational users and were endorsed by the SLSTR Quality Working Group (QWG). EUMETSAT continues its collaboration with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) to prepare the future operational assimilation of SLSTR data.

More information related to this Collection 3.0 can be found in the Product Notice.

The extension towards Collection 3.1 with a refined ocean colour surface modelling and revised L1B uncertainties is already in preparation for Autumn 2023.

The CS3 NRT L2 aerosol product is produced by the reference 'Optimized Simultaneous Surface Aerosol Retrieval' (OSSAR-CS3) processor, dedicated to processing SLSTR data, upgraded as version 4.0, developed by EUMETSAT on behalf of the European Commission (EC), and operated by the EUMETSAT operational Sentinel-3 ground segment centre.

For more information or to provide feedback on the new Collection 3.0, contact our User Service Helpdesk.