Sentinel 2 L2A image quality - how to remove these whitish hue / artifacts along the fringes of the limestone/karst/ rocky landscapes

This image is practically cloud free (0.00004%), but as you can see there is this cloudy white hue around the limestone cliffs which makes this image practicly useless. DOS-1 Atmospheric correction didn’t manage to remove these strange artifacts. Anyone knows what it is?

I never had any problems with Sentinel 2 images, prior of moving the Sentinel data to the copernicus.eu website. I never seen these artifacts before around rocky landscapes when i downloaded from Earth explorer.

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Hi @peterbrakels85 ,

Could you please specify the bounding box and the timestamp of this image?

yes sure, but its on all the images i have been checking so far. I set the filter to <15% cloudcover. There are several without cloud cover in the dry season. This is in central Laos, Khammouane province. I noticed some forest fires, which show up clearly. But these white smokey edges along the limestone cliffs are all throughout the landscape. I have images from January, February, March and April 2023 for comparison, all very similar so it doesn’t really matter. My point is, is there a way to mask/ remove this?

S2B_MSIL2A

27 February 2023

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Hi @peterbrakels85 ,

This effect seems to be related to the sen2cor process which is applied to generate the L2A product. If you inspect the L1C product, you’ll see that this hue effect does not exist in the L1C product. Here is a comparison.

If plausible, I would recommend using the L1C product in this case.

Ok i will. Thank you so much for your help! I will not lose any image quality with L1C right, its the same resolution images available as L2A right?

The resolution is the same. There is more information in the Sentinel-2 L1C and the Sentinel-2 L2A documentation.

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