Timeliness and Availability of SPOT-VEGETATION Data
Verbeiren, Sara; Gontier, Eric; Deronde, Bart
VITO nv, BELGIUM

Since March 1998, the VEGETATION programme has been monitoring the world daily. Both instruments, VEGETATION 1 and 2, provide accurate measurements of basic characteristics of vegetation canopies on an operational basis. The reception, processing and archiving of the data is centralized, easily accessible through the catalogue and is distributed to the customers within two days after acquisition.

VITO is delivering data within the framework of the GSC-Data Access project since March 2009. In June 2011, the contract was renewed under the GSCDA Datawarehouse project, so that the global SPOT-VEGETATION data could be delivered to the community till end of May 2014. Within the GSCDA project, VITO currently has six customers, of which two of them ask for the global dataset. The delivery of segments, daily and ten-daily products is rarely interrupted and results in a timeliness of more than 99%. Due to antenna failure, image and attitude errors some data are missing from our archive. However, more than 98% of the planned acquisitions are delivered to the users.

Preparations are made to incorporate the delivery of Proba-V data within the GSCDA project. At the moment of writing, the new satellite is to be launched in May 2013. After commissioning, data can be obtained by the users at the end of this year.