Daily top-of-atmosphere reflectance, raw input (Copernicus)
What it measures. Records how much sunlight is reflected back to space at the top of the atmosphere, before haze, clouds, and air effects are removed. Pixels are about a kilometer wide. This is an upstream input rather than a finished surface map.
How it's made. Produced by the SYNERGY instruments on ESA Copernicus's Sentinel-3 satellites at Level-2, extending the measurement series begun by the SPOT VEGETATION sensors.
How & where you'd use it. Mainly a building block for scientists who apply their own atmospheric corrections to derive surface reflectance, vegetation, or other land products.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2018-10-08 → 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 Top of Atmosphere Reflectance product, which is a SPOT VEGETATION Continuity Product containing measurement data similar to that obtained by the VEGETATION instrument onboad the SPOT-3 and SPOT-4 satellites.
Get the data
# 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-vgp-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.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC