Sixth International Conference on Remote Sensing and Geoinformation of Environment 26-29 March, 2018 - Cyprus

With the free Sentinel-2 (S2) data of the Copernicus programme, new opportunities arise for the mining community that can ease its environmental and social challenges through improved monitoring. At the moment, most users worldwide need to process S2 data to achieve surface reflectance. There are recent powerful open-source developments in atmospheric correction algorithms of S2 data such as iCOR and Sen2Cor along with MAJA that publicly shares its executable files. Open pit mining in tropical sites are not the typical conditions that semi-empirical models are designed or validated for. This work aims at assessing the discrepancy in the results of the three approaches for an area rich with laterite mining activities in central New Caledonia. Cloud retrieval is compared along with aerosol optical thickness and water vapor content estimation. Finally, consistency in surface reflectance is investigated per season, and correlations among the output of the approaches are quantified. The authors recommend to the developers of the various methods to include mining sites for validation because their highly appreciated work is important to the end-users of the raw materials community.