In: Wagner W., Székely, B. (eds.): ISPRS TC VII Symposium - 100 Years ISPRS, Vienna, Austria, July 5-7, 2010, IAPRS, Vol. XXXVIII, Part 7B
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• Natural Resource Monitoring in Africa (NARMA):
develop an environmental monitoring capacity over
African countries for the needs of the EC services and
for regional and continental EC partners in African
countries.
• Global Crop Monitoring (GCM): provide objective,
real-time crop assessment and yield forecasts in
support to EC policies in the field “agriculture”
(Common Agriculture Policy) and Food Security.
A cross-cutting Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) has been set
up with the aim to develop an operational service for the
discovery, viewing, access, delivery and support of all products
generated in the geoland2 project.
Altogether the geoland2 consortium, led by Astrium GmbH
(Germany) and co-led by CNES (France), gathers 50 European
partners from 21 European countries, and mixes three categories
of private and public organisations: users, service providers and
researchers.
the BioPar products. The development teams implement the
algorithms in processing lines, and generate test data sets for
user evaluation. The pre-operation centers perform the pre-
operational production at regional, European and global scales
in NRT and in offline mode. Finally, the resulting
biogeophysical parameters are disseminated by the Spatial Data
Infrastructure cross-cutting issue, in a format in accordance with
the INSPIRE directive.
[=£> Work Flow
3. THE BIOGEOPHYSICAL PARAMETER CORE
MAPPING SERVICE (BIOPAR)
Figure 2. Main building blocks and generic data flow for BioPar
processing lines
3.1 Introduction
The Biogeophysical Parameter Core Service, named in short
BioPar, is a joint venture of 13 partners: HYGEOS, CNES,
Infoterra France, INRA, and Météo-France (France), Université
Catholique de Louvain (UCL), and VITO (Belgium), Institute
of Meteorology (Portugal), Vienna University of Technology
(Austria), EOLAB (Spain), University of Leicester, and
ECMWF (United Kingdom), and Igik (Poland).
BioPar aims at setting-up validated operational infrastructure
able to provide bio-geophysical variables describing the
vegetation state, the radiation budget at the surface, and the
water cycle at any scale of interest (regional, continental, and
global), both in near real time and off-line mode, and that meets
the users’ needs.
The BioPar CMS is a strongly user-driven service. The CMS
portfolio has been designed from a careful analysis of the needs
of CIS and other CMS, considered as good proxys of a large
community of users including institutional users, future
downstream services and the international science community.
The study logic will be such that the products, their timeliness,
and the R&D actions have been defined taking into account the
users’ needs; the pre-operations, in NRT and in off-line mode,
will start only with a user “green light”, given after they have
successfully integrated test products into their current practices
and working environment.
4. THE BIOPAR PRODUCTS
4.1 Service Portfolio
3.2 Concept
The BioPar concept relies on research and development
activities, shared in 3 topics (vegetation, radiation, water), and
on demonstration operations, shared in NRT and off-line
processing (Figure 2). In particular, the R&D activities focus on
parameters as LAI, FAPAR, albedo, burnt areas or soil
moisture, which have been identified by the WMO/GCOS in the
context of UNFCCC as Essential Climate Variables (ECV). The
research teams define the retrieval algorithms based upon
existing and validated methodologies, improve them to match as
well as possible the user requirements, and initiate innovative
actions to adapt them to the technical specificities of the next
generation of sensors in order to ensure the continuity of the
service. Effort will be put on the compatibility between historic
and current products so that long-time series are available after
the reprocessing of available EO archives. Independent teams
perform the product validation, following a procedure
established in close collaboration with the users and
international bodies, relying on comparison with ground
measurements collected over site networks, on inter-comparison
with existing similar satellite products, and on data assimilation
techniques, with the aim to guaranty the scientific relevancy of
Product
NRT/
Off-line
Spatial
Resolution
Spatial
coverage
Temporal
Resolution
Sensor
(Back-up)
Continental Vegetation
LAI, FCover, FAPAR, DMP, NDVI,
Phenology
NRT
1 km
Global
10-days
VGT
(MODIS)
Times series of vegetation products
Off-line
4 km
Global
10-days
AVHRR
+ VGT
Burnt areas + seasonality
NRT
1 km
global
Daily
VGT
MERIS FR biophysical variables
NRT
300 m
Europe
10-days
MERIS
HR biophysical products
Off-line
10 m
Pilot Areas
4 times/year
SPOT
f
1
f
Downwelling Shortwave Surface Flux
Downwelling Longwave Surface Flux
NRT
~5 km
Global
3 hours
EGEO +
AVHRR
Land Surface Temperature
NRT
-5 km
Global
3 hours, daily,
10-days
EGEO +
AVHRR
Surface Albedo
NRT
1 km
Global
10-days
VGT
Surface Albedo
NRT
~5 km
Global
10-days
EGEO +
AVHRR
Water cycle
Water bodies + seasonality
NRT
1km. 250m
Africa
10-days
VGT,
MODIS
Soil Moisture + Freeze/Thaw
NRT
0.1°
Global
Daily
ASCAT
Time series of soil moisture products
Off-line
25 km
Global
Daily
ERS-1&2
Scatt
Table 3. BioPar CMS Portfolio
The BioPar CMS portfolio includes vegetation (Leaf Area
Index (LAI), Fraction of Absorbed PAR, Fraction of green
cover, NDVI, Dry Matter Productivity, Phenology), burnt areas,
downwelling shortwave and longwave radiation fluxes, land