Free Delivery of a 30-YEAR Vegetation Product Archive by the Biopar Land Monitoring Core Service

Geoland2 project is part of the GMES EU-lead initiative and intends to prepare, validate and demonstrate pre-operational service chains and products of the Land Monitoring Core Service. The BioPar Core Monitoring Service distributes through the Geoland 2 portal global products related to biophysical variables : the Leaf Area Index (LAI), the Fraction of green Vegetation Cover (FCover), the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) and the Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI). Long term global biophysical products are of great interest for earth science modeling applications and global change monitoring. Since end of 2011 a 12-year archive (1999-2011) of these biophysical vegetation products derived from SPOT/VEGETATION sensor, called GEOV1_VGT, is available and is continuously updated every ten days. Since this summer, a 20-year archive (1981-2000) of LAI, FAPAR and FCover biophysical vegetation products derived from the AVHRR long term data archive, called GEOV1_AVHRR, has been processed by CNES and is now available through the Geoland 2 portal. The LAI, FAPAR and FCover products issued from VGT and AVHRR data have the same characteristics (temporal resolution 10 days, global coverage) except for the spatial resolution (1/112° for VGT and 0.05° for AVHRR), with an overlap of two years (1999-2000). The evaluation of GEOV1_VGT and GEOV1_AVHRR archive indicates a very good agreement between the two datasets, including a similar level of accuracy in comparison with ground-based measurements made during the 1999-2000 overlap period. Despite that a more consistent 30-year global product at a lower resolution is very useful for communities studying carbon cycle, climate or water cycle. The last step, foreseen for this Autumn, is to process these two archives and to provide to the users a continuous 30-year vegetation product (called GEOV1_GCM) at 0.5° scale. Close to its end the BioPar project has provided demonstration products evaluated by independent thematic validation team and by external experts of the scientific community. Today the vegetation variable operational products derived from SPOT/VEGETATION and AVHRR are available on the Geoland 2 portal, from 1981 to 2011. These long-term archives will propose a unique reference data for long term biophysical variable analysis. The proposed poster intends to introduce the Geoland 2 project and the BioPar CMS, and to detail the BioPar product portfolio distributed for free to the science community. It will also introduce the usefulness of this long-term archive by giving some interesting example of LAI, FAPAR, NDVI and Fcover maps over the globe.