A Sentinel-3 foundation model for ocean colourGeoffrey Dawson, Remy Vandaele, Andrew Taylor, David Moffat, Helen Tamura-Wicks, Sarah Jackson, Rosie Lickorish, Paolo Fraccaro, Hywel Williams, Chunbo Luo, Anne Joneshttps://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21273
A Sentinel-3 foundation model for ocean colourArtificial Intelligence (AI) Foundation models (FMs), pre-trained on massive unlabelled datasets, have the potential to drastically change AI applications in ocean science, where labelled data are often sparse and expensive to collect. In this work, we describe a new foundation model using the Prithvi-EO Vision Transformer architecture which has been pre-trained to reconstruct data from the Sentinel-3 Ocean and Land Colour Instrument (OLCI). We evaluate the model by fine-tuning on two downstrea…