Examination of Sentinel-2A multi-spectral instrument (MSI) reflectance anisotropy and the suitability of a general method to normalize MSI reflectance to nadir BRDF adjusted reflectance

The suitability of a recently published methodology developed to generate Landsat nadir BRDF-adjusted reflectance (NBAR) was examined for Sentinel-2A application. The methodology uses fixed MODIS BRDF spectral parameters and is attractive because it has little sensitivity to the land cover type, condition, or surface disturbance and can be derived in a computationally efficient manner globally. It was applied to the southern Africa Sentinel-2A data and shown to reduce Sentinel-2A BRDF effects. The average difference between the reflectance in the forward and backward scatter directions at the Sentinel-2A scan edges was smaller in the NBAR data than in the corresponding surface reflectance data. Residual BRDF effects in the Sentinel-2A NBAR data occurred likely because of atmospheric correction and sensor calibration errors and inadequacies in the NBAR derivation approach. These issues are discussed with recommendations for future research including global and red-edge Sentinel-2A NBAR derivation that were not considered in this study.