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

Land surface color plus haze, short-delay (Copernicus)

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

What it measures. Surface reflectance over land (how it bounces sunlight back), along with the amount of airborne haze and an estimate of particle size.

How it's made. Produced by combining ESA Copernicus' Sentinel-3 color and thermal instruments into a Level-2 Synergy land product at 300 m, in a "slow-time-critical" version.

How & where you'd use it. Useful for land-surface monitoring and atmospheric correction when a small delay improves the data quality.

What's measured

300mAerosolCopernicusECESAEULandMixedPT48HReflectanceSY_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-stc"],   # 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.