SuperDove radiometric data assessment in coastal and inland waters

The use of high-resolution data in aquatic applications increased significantly in the last decade with the launch of decametre-scale optical sensors. More recently, commercial very-high resolution (VHR) sensors, offering finer spatial and temporal resolutions, have shown the potential of complementing data from high-resolution missions. Planet SuperDove (SD), with a band-setting similar to the Copernicus Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (S2-MSI), a 3-m spatial resolution and quasi-daily revisiting time, show the potential for widening water monitoring applications to smaller water basins, and finer-scale phenomena. However, the uncertainties in SD products need to be quantified, to assess their fitness-for-purpose for these applications. This work aims to provide uncertainty estimates for SD-derived aquatic remote sensing reflectance (RRS) in different water types, benefitting from the radiometric measurements of the AERONET-OC network. RRS was derived from both Surface Reflectance (SR) products, distributed by Planet, or from data processed with ACOLITE. The comparability between SD and S2-MSI products was also assessed comparing RRS and Rayleigh-corrected reflectance (RRC) from S2-MSI and SD. The results indicate generally low performance across all bands for both SD RRS products, except in the most turbid waters, and highlight the lack of a publicly available robust atmospheric correction processor for SD data for most optical water types. The comparison to S2-MSI shows promising results only when comparing RRC values, but differences still suggest issues associated with calibration and radiometry of the SD sensors. The results also highlight the need for a harmonization strategy to ensure consistent integration of these datasets within multi-source monitoring systems.