GEE ACOLITE

Atmospheric correction for Sentinel-2 imagery on Google Earth Engine using the ACOLITE Dark Spectrum Fitting (DSF) method.

Description

gee_acolite adapts the ACOLITE atmospheric correction to Google Earth Engine workflows. A single global AOT is estimated per image using ACOLITE LUTs (client-side), while all pixel operations run server-side on GEE.

Key features:

• Dark Spectrum Fitting: darkest pixel, percentile, or intercept methods
• AOT Estimation: single fixed AOT per image via LUT interpolation
• Atmospheric Correction: full LUT-based surface reflectance retrieval
• Water Quality Products: SPM, turbidity, chlorophyll-a, Rrs, bathymetry indices
• Cloud & Water Masking: integration with Sentinel-2 Cloud Probability

Installation

pip install gee_acolite

ACOLITE

gee_acolite requires ACOLITE for LUT loading and atmospheric calculations. ACOLITE is not on PyPI — download it from its official repository and add it to your Python path:

import sys
sys.path.append('/path/to/acolite')

import acolite as ac
from gee_acolite import ACOLITE

Quickstart

import sys
sys.path.append('/path/to/acolite')

import ee
import acolite as ac
from gee_acolite import ACOLITE
from gee_acolite.utils.search import search

ee.Initialize(project='your-cloud-project-id')

roi = ee.Geometry.Rectangle([-0.40, 39.27, -0.28, 39.38])
images = search(roi, '2023-06-01', '2023-06-30', tile='30SYJ')

settings = {
    's2_target_res': 10,
    'dsf_spectrum_option': 'darkest',
    'l2w_parameters': ['spm_nechad2016', 'chl_oc3', 'pSDB_green'],
}

ac_gee = ACOLITE(ac, settings)
corrected, final_settings = ac_gee.correct(images)

Requirements

• Python ≥ 3.11
• earthengine-api ≥ 0.1.350
• numpy ≥ 1.20.0
• scipy ≥ 1.7.0
• netcdf4 ≥ 1.7.0
• ACOLITE (separate installation)

Documentation

Full documentation including API reference, examples, and architecture diagrams is available at: https://aouei.github.io/gee_acolite

Water Quality Products

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please fork the repository, create a feature branch, and submit a pull request.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 — see LICENSE for details.

Citation

If you use this package in your research, please cite:

@software{heredia_sergio_2026_gee_acolite,
  author    = {Heredia, Sergio},
  title     = {gee\_acolite},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.1},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.18367865},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18367865}
}

And the original ACOLITE paper:

@article{vanhellemont2019,
  author  = {Vanhellemont, Quinten and Ruddick, Kevin},
  title   = {Adaptation of the dark spectrum fitting atmospheric correction for aquatic applications of the Landsat and Sentinel-2 archives},
  journal = {Remote Sensing of Environment},
  volume  = {225},
  pages   = {175--192},
  year    = {2019},
  doi     = {10.1016/j.rse.2019.03.010}
}

Acknowledgments

This package is based on the ACOLITE software developed by RBINS (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences).

This software was developed at the Institute of Marine Sciences of Andalusia (ICMAN-CSIC), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Puerto Real, Spain.

Contact

• GitHub: @Aouei
• Email: sergiohercar1@gmail.com