Top of Canopy Reflectance 2012-2024 (raster 1km), Ground-Based Observations for Validation project sites - version 1.1.0, Dec 2025

The Surface Reflectance or Top-Of-Canopy Reflectance (TOC-R) quantifies the fraction of the sunlight reflected by the surface of the Earth, in a narrow spectral range. TOC-R is normalised into a single angular configuration to avoid strong geometrical heterogeneity. TOC-R is dimensionless. Two types of data are available: a ground albedometer footprint, representing 1 km2, and a 3 x 3 upscaled macropixel computed by satellite images with an angular resolution of 1/112 degree.

The GBOV service (Ground-Based Observations for Validation) is a project funded by the European Commission. Its objective is to provide analysis-ready validation data to support the evaluation of Earth Observation products. The core aim of GBOV is to generate upscaled products derived from ground-based measurements.

This dataset consists of Land Products (LPs) generated using shortwave in-situ measurements collected from stations located in North America, Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia. These ground data are combined with Sentinel-2 Level 2 surface reflectance products to build this upscaled TOC-R LP.