VEGETATION-PROBAV-SENTINEL3: Continuity in the Global Terrestrial Biosphere Monitoring from 1998 to 2020
Maisongrande, Philippe1; Baret, Frédéric2; Leroy, Marc3; Malingreau, Jean-Paul4; Bartholomé, Etienne5; Defourny, Pierre6
1CNES/LEGOS, FRANCE; 2INRA, FRANCE; 3CNES, FRANCE; 4JRC-EC, ITALY; 5JRC, ITALY; 6UCL, BELGIUM

Since 1998, the SPOT/VEGETATION operational Mission has offered to the international community of its users a complete global coverage of the continental surfaces at the kilometric resolution in the blue, red, Near and Short Wave Infrared Channels on a daily basis.
For 15 years now, a very efficient delivery service and a high quality data set has been insured in term of calibration, clouds screening, atmospheric correction and directional normalisation. The constant attention paid to the quality of the 2 successive sensors VGT 1 and VGT2 respectively launched onboard SPOT4 and SPOT5 has made possible the construction of a unique consistent 15year data set devoted to the monitoring of the land surface vegetation.
VEGETATION 2 being expected to last until June 2014, in Spring 2013 the PROBA-V Mission will be launched in order to insure the continuity of VEGETATION operational services devoted to science, international private and institutional applications.
Spearheaded by ESA and BELSPO, PROBA-V consists in a smaller version of the VGT optical Instruments with a multispectral spectrometer including the same spectral bands as its predecessors and a quasi equivalent large swath (around 2250 km) to guarantee the same daily global coverage at the 330m improved resolution.
After reminding the VEGETATON mission, its operational services, and its applications in relationship with continental surfaces (LULC, NPP, water resources, snow...), we introduce ProbaV and show how it will insure the continuity of the current 15year VEGETATION archive while it will also fill the gap towards the ESA Sentinel 3.