The GMES Land Monitoring Service: achievements and continuity

The GMES Land Monitoring service provides detailed information for land monitoring at regional, national, European and global levels, including seasonal and annual changes of variables such as vegetation state or the water cycle (http://www.gmes-geoland.info). The service has a wide range of applications such as the management of forests, of water and natural resources, agriculture, and food availability in developing countries. It also helps to analyze the terrestrial carbon cycle and contribute to an even better understanding of climate change. The demonstration of the GMES Land Monitoring service is made in the framework of the FP7/geoland2 project which supplies the community with basic and advanced thematic products. In particular, it provides long time series of biophysical variables derived from medium and low resolution sensor data, covering the Europe and the whole globe which are freely available on the geoland2 portal (http://www.geoland2.eu). Beyond 2013 and for four years duration, the production of the global land service will continue in the framework of GMES Initial Operations with a specific focus on a series of biogeophysical products describing the status and the changes of land surface at global scale at one kilometer resolution. In view of service continuity, the existing retrieval methodologies will be adapted to new input data sets (e.g. Proba-V and Sentinel-3) that could be used in replacement of current sensors which reach the end of their service-lifetime. In parallel, some research and development activities, necessary to support the operations and their move to finer resolution, will be performed in the FP7/ImagineS project, starting in November 2012 for 40 months, which aims at providing some Terrestrial Essential Climate Variables (LAI, FAPAR, Surface albedo) by merging the information coming from different Sentinel sensors and other GMES contributing missions. The final objective is to develop qualified software able to process multi-sensor data at the global scale to prepare the use of Sentinels data in an operational context. The presentation will make an overview of the geoland2 achievements, especially the global biogeophysical products which are accessible to the international community, will describe the Global Land GMES Initial Operations services, and will introduce the ImagineS activities and objectives.