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