Remote Sensing of Environment 237 (2020) 111523

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Remote Sensing of Environment

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Letter to the editor

Comments on the published article: “Capability of Sentinel-2 data for estimating maximum T
evapotranspiration and irrigation requirements for tomato crop in central Italy” by S. Vanino et al.,
Remote Sensing of Environment, 215(2018), 452-470

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

Keywords: This short communication concerns errors in the albedo computation from Sentinel 2 in the article by S. Vanino
Albedo et al., “Capability of Sentinel-2 data for estimating maximum evapotranspiration and irrigation requirements for
Weighting coefficients tomato crop in Central Italy”, Remote Sensing of Environment, vol. 215, 2018, Pag. 452–470, https://doi.org/
Sentinel-2 10.1016/j.rse.2018.06.035.

Dear Editor,
S. Vanino et al., published the article entitled “Capability of
Sentinel-2 data for estimating maximum evapotranspiration and irri-
gation requirements for tomato crop in Central Italy” in Remote Sensing
of Environment, vol. 215, 2018, Pag. 452–470, https://doi.org/10.
1016/j.rse.2018.06.035, where, in the section 3.3.2. “Earth
Observation products”, they computed the broadband surface albedo by
eq. 1. They derived the weighting coefficients to be applied to the
different Sentinel-2 bands, used for the albedo computation, reporting
them in the Table 3 of the paper.
In this short communication, I would like to point out some short-
comings in the proposed albedo computation:
• The sum of the reported weighting coefficients (Table 3) applied to
the Sentinel 2 bands for the albedo estimation is 0.721 instead of 1.
It is worth to note that this sum must be 1 to ensure the physical
meaning of the weighting coefficients and of the albedo value itself,
as reported in literature (Tasumi et al., 2008; Ke et al., 2016;
Baldinelli et al., 2017).
I understand that this mistake does not cause serious concerns on
the soundness of the conclusions drawn in the paper by S. Vanino et al.,
and this short communication is only a warning not to use the published
weighting coefficients of Table 3 for albedo computation from Sentinel-
2 data.
• These coefficients are derived by means of Eq.2, with the values of
the mean extra-terrestrial solar irradiance reported in the fourth
column of the cited Table 3, indicated with Esun. Therefore, the au-
thors used a solar radiation out of the atmosphere, i.e. not
atmospherically corrected. Since the authors are computing the
broadband surface albedo, the at-surface spectral solar irradiance
should be used, i.e. Esun after the atmospheric correction that is
frequency dependent.
Overall, using the coefficients of Table 3, the error on albedo esti-
mation could be very significant, considering that the albedo range is
between 0 and 1.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
References
Baldinelli, G., Bonafoni, S., Rotili, A., 2017. Albedo retrieval from multispectral landsat 8
observation in urban environment: algorithm validation by in situ measurements.
IEEE J. Select. Topics Appl. Earth Observ. Remote Sens. 10 (10), 4504–4511. https://
doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2017.2721549.
Ke, Y., Im, J., Park, J.S., Gong, H., 2016. Downscaling of MODIS one kilometer evapo-
transpiration using landsat-8 data and machine learning approaches. Remote Sens. 8
(3), 215. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs8030215.
Tasumi, M., Allen, R.G., Trezza, R., 2008. At-Surface reflectance and albedo from satellite
for operational calculation of land surface energy balance. J. Hydrol. Eng. 13 (2),
51–63. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)1084-0699. (2008)13:2(51).
Stefania Bonafoni
Department of Engineering, University of Perugia, via G. Duranti 93, 06125,
Perugia, Italy
E-mail address: stefania.bonafoni@unipg.it.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2019.111523
Received 27 October 2019; Accepted 3 November 2019
Available online 21 November 2019
0034-4257/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.