Nieuwsbericht 21 February 2022

Kick off CCI Vegetation

Additional Essential Climate Variables to support global climate science

We are proud to announce the kick off of CCI Vegetation, a brand new project of the ESA Climate Change Initiative. CCI Vegetation aims to realize the full potential of the long-term global Earth Observation archives that ESA has established over the past 30 years, as a significant and timely contribution to the Essential Climate Variables (ECV) databases required by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

 

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This contract expands the ESA CCI portfolio with two additional ECVs: one-sided leaf area index (LAI) and the fraction of incident surface solar radiation in the photosynthetically active region (0.4-0.7 μm) absorbed by vegetation (FAPAR). These variables are widely used as model state variables of the land surface: for estimation of surface energy and water budgets, carbon sequestration, and phenological responses.
 

Within this project VITO Remote Sensing is responsible to:

  • Collect and update user requirements for LAI and FAPAR 
  • Investigate, develop and qualify multi-sensor, global LAI and FAPAR products for climate science at 300 m and 1 km spatial resolution for the period 2000 – 2020 derived jointly from:
    • SPOT4/5-VGT1/2 
    • Envisat-MERIS
    • Terra/Aqua-MODIS
    • Metop-A/B/C-AVHRR 
    • PROBA-V 
    • SuomiNPP VIIRS
    • Sentinel-3 OLCI
       
  • Define, develop and implement a processing system based on a generic cloud-native approach building on open-source and proven technology 
  • Assess the LAI and FAPAR products by Climate Users (Imperial College London and University of Antwerp)

The final goal of the CCI program is to transfer the developed data sets and processing systems to operational production outside CCI such as the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

The consortium is led by VITO (Belgium) together with University of Twente (The Netherlands), Eolab (Spain), FastOpt (Germany), Hygeos (France). The Climate Research Groups involved in this contract are Imperial College London (UK) and University of Antwerp (Belgium).

 

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