Brief communication: Evaluation of the snow cover detection in the Copernicus High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service

Abstract. The High Resolution Snow & Ice Monitoring Service was launched in 2020 to provide near real time, pan-European snow and ice information at 20 m resolution from Sentinel-2 observations. Here we present an evaluation of the snow detection using a database of snow depth observations from 1764 stations across Europe over the hydrological year 2016–2017. We find a good agreement between both datasets with an accuracy of 94 % (proportion of correct classifications) and kappa of 0.80. More accurate (+6 % kappa) retrievals are obtained by excluding low quality pixels at the cost of a reduced coverage (−13 % data).