Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/sentinel-3-syn-2-syn-ntc
sentinel-3-syn-2-syn-ntc·dataset

Land surface color plus haze, 300 m (Copernicus)

Sentinel-3 Land Surface Reflectance and Aerosol (NTC)
atmosphere ESA ESA Copernicus active
In plain English

What it measures. How sunlight reflects off the land surface (surface reflectance), together with how much haze is in the air above it and an estimate of the particles' size.

How it's made. Created by merging the color and thermal sensors of ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 satellites into a Level-2 Synergy land product at 300 m resolution.

How & where you'd use it. Supports land-cover and vegetation studies and corrects other images for atmospheric haze to reveal the true surface.

What's measured

300mAerosolCopernicusECESAEULandMixedP1MReflectanceSY_2_SYN____SatelliteSentinelSentinel-3

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2018-09-22 → ongoing
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

This Collection provides the Sentinel-3 Synergy Level-2 Land Surface Reflectance and Aerosol product, which contains data on Surface Directional Reflectance, Aerosol Optical Thickness, and an Angstrom coefficient estimate over land.

Get the data

copernicus_access.py
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
    collections=["sentinel-3-syn-2-syn-ntc"],   # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
    bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60),             # your area (W,S,E,N)
    datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items())            # then read assets with rioxarray / xarray
Browsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.