The Sentinel 2 MSI Spectral Mixing Space

A composite spectral feature space is used to characterize the spectral mixing properties of Sentinel 2 Multispectral Instrument (MSI) spectra over a wide diversity of landscapes. Characterizing the linearity of spectral mixing and identifying bounding spectral endmembers allows the Substrate Vegetation Dark (SVD) spectral mixture model previously developed for the Landsat and MODIS sensors to be extended to the Sentinel 2 MSI sensors. The utility of the SVD model is its ability to represent a wide variety of landscapes in terms of the areal abundance of their most spectrally and physically distinct components. Combining the benefits of location-specific spectral mixture models with standardized spectral indices, the physically based SVD model offers simplicity, consistency, inclusivity and applicability for a wide variety of land cover mapping applications. In this study, a set of 110 image tiles compiled from spectral diversity hotspots worldwide provide a basis for this characterization, and for identification of spectral endmembers that span the feature space. The resulting spectral mixing space of these 13,000,000,000 spectra is effectively 3D, with 99% of variance in 3 low order principal component dimensions. Four physically distinct spectral mixing continua are identified: Snow:Firn:Ice, Reef:Water, Evaporite:Water and Substrate:Vegetation:Dark (water or shadow). The first 3 continua exhibit complex nonlinearities, but the geographically dominant Substrate:Vegetation:Dark (SVD) continuum is conspicuous in the linearity of its spectral mixing. Bounding endmember spectra are identified for the SVD continuum. In a subset of 80 landscapes, excluding the 3 nonlinear mixing continua (reefs, evaporites, cryosphere), a 3 endmember (SVD) linear mixture model produces endmember fraction estimates that represent 99% of modeled spectra with