Operational 333m biophysical products of the copernicus global land service for agriculture monitoring

Abstract

The Copernicus Global Land service provides continuously a set of bio-geophysical variables describing, over the whole globe, the vegetation dynamic, the energy budget at the continental surface and some components of the water cycle. These generic products serve numerous applications including agriculture and food security monitoring. The portfolio of the Copernicus Global Land service contains Essential Climate Variables like the Leaf Area Index (LAI), the Fraction of PAR absorbed by the vegetation (FAPAR), the surface albedo, the Land Surface Temperature, the soil moisture, the burnt areas, the areas of water bodies, and additional vegetation indices. They are generated every hour, every day or every 10 days on a reliable automatic basis from Earth Observation satellite data. Beside this timely production, the available historical archives have been processed, using the same innovative algorithms, to get consistent time series as long as possible. All products are accessible, free of charge after registration through FTP/HTTP (http://land.copernicus.eu/global/) and through the GEONETCast satellite distribution system. The evolution of the service towards the operations at 333m resolution is partly supported by the FP7/ImagineS project which focuses on the retrieval of LAI, FAPAR, fraction of vegetation cover and surface albedo from PROBA-V sensor data. The paper presents the innovations of the 333m biophysical products, make an overview of their current status, and introduce the next steps of the evolution of the Copernicus Global Land service.