Validation SIMEC adjacency correction for coastal and inland waters

Several new satellites such as Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 and the hyperspectral satellites EnMAP and PRISMA will be launched in the near future. These EO sensors will provide a wealth of new data at increased spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions. Although not all conceived as being ocean colour missions, the inland and coastal water community could benefit considerably from these new data sources. A higher spatial resolution extends the existing monitoring efforts to cover even the first nautical mile from coast where the Water Framework Directive (WFD) is still in force or to lakes which are small and have irregular shapes and can not be monitored with the existing missions. However for these nearshore coastal and inland waters adjacency effects complicate the atmospheric correction process. Light reflected from the nearby land can be forward scattered by the atmosphere into the sensor’s field of view. This causes a “blurring“ of the signal and the effect, generally known as adjacency, background or environment effect, modifies the spectral signature of the observed pixel. Here we present SIMEC (SIMilarity Environment Correction), a new approach for the correction of adjacency effects