Propagating Sentinel-2 Top-of-Atmosphere Radiometric Uncertainty into
Land Surface Phenology Metrics Using a Monte Carlo Framework
Abstract
Time series of optical image allow to derive land surface phenology
metrics. These metrics are only complete with a statement about their
uncertainty. A source of uncertainty is the radiometry of the sensor. We
focused on Sentinel-2 MSI data since quantitative estimates of
radiometric uncertainties are available. Uncertainties were propagated
within a Monte-Carlo framework into the Normalized Difference Vegetation
Index (NDVI), three-band Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) and Green Leaf
Area Index (GLAI) derived from radiative transfer model inversion. In
addition, we studied the effect of propagated uncertainties on scene
pre-classification. Propagation was carried out for 34 scenes acquired
for a crop growing season over an agricultural region in Switzerland
using the TIMESAT approach for crop phenology estimation. Propagated
uncertainties had little impact on the classification except for
spectrally mixed pixels. Effects on the spectral indices and GLAI were
more pronounced. In detail, GLAI was more uncertain due to the
ill-posedness of radiative transfer model inversion (median relative
uncertainty for all crop pixels and Sentinel-2 scenes:
4.4\%) than EVI (2.7\%) and NDVI
(1.1\%). In crop phenology, phenological metrics
exhibited largest uncertainties in the case of GLAI. The magnitude of
uncertainty in the metrics depends on the error correlation between the
scenes, which we assumed to be either zero (uncorrelated) or one (fully
correlated) since the actual degree of correlation is unknown. If
uncertainties are fully correlated, uncertainties in phenological
metrics are small (2 to 3 days) but can take values up to greater 10
days under the uncorrelated assumption.