Operating the Copernicus Global Land Service
Smets, Bruno¹; Lacaze, Roselyne²; Trigo, Isabel³; Jann, Alexander⁴; Calvet, Jean-Christophe⁵; Camacho, Fernando⁶; Baret, Frédéric⁷; Wagner, Wolfgang⁸; Defourny, Pierre⁹; Tansey, Kevin¹⁰; Da Camara, Carlos^11
1VITO, BELGIUM; ²Hygeos, FRANCE; ³Instituto Portugês do Mar e da Atmosfera, PORTUGAL; ⁴Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik, AUSTRIA; ⁵Météo-France, FRANCE; ⁶EOLAB, SPAIN; ⁷Institut National de Recherche Agronomique, FRANCE; ⁸Technical University of Vienna, AUSTRIA; ⁹Université Catholique de Louvain, BELGIUM; ¹⁰University of Leicester, UNITED KINGDOM; ¹¹Instituto D. Luis, PORTUGAL

From 1st January 2013, the Copernicus Global Land Service is operational, providing continuously to European, African and International users a set of biophysical variables describing the vegetation conditions, the energy budget at the continental surface and the water cycle over the whole globe. These generic products can serve numerous applications such as agriculture and food security monitoring, weather forecast, climate change impact studies, water, forest and natural resources management.

The Copernicus Global Land Service is built amongst others on the achievements of the BioPar component of the FP7 geoland2 project. Essential Climate Variables like the Leaf Area Index (LAI), the Fraction of PAR absorbed by the vegetation (FAPAR), the surface albedo, the Land Surface Temperature, the soil moisture, the burnt areas, the areas of water bodies, and additional vegetation indices, are generated every hour, every day or every 10 days on a reliable and automatic basis from Earth Observation satellite data. Beside this timely production, the available historical archives have been processed, using the same innovative algorithms, to get consistent time series as long as possible. All products are accessible, free of charge after registration through FTP/HTTP and through the GEONETCast satellite distribution system. The products are provided with documents describing the physical methodologies, the technical properties of products, and the results of validation exercises. The service performs a continuous quality monitoring on three levels: technical, scientific and cross-cutting, and is improved through feedback from an independent team performing regular independent reviews and providing user feedback through the organization of user group meetings.

In view of service continuity, research and development is performed in two parallel ways. On one hand, within the service, the existing retrieval methodologies will be adapted to (a) new input data sets (e.g. Proba-V) that will be used in replacement of current sensor (SPOT/VGT) which reached the end of its service-lifetime, and (b) to incorporate user feedback, and (c) keep the historical archives consistent with the latest sensor inputs. On the other hand, outside the service, through innovations providing finer resolution or improved algorithms in FP7 or other programs (e.g. FP7/ImagineS, EUMETSAT/L-SAF).

The presentation will present the Copernicus Global Land Operational Service, its current status, and its planned evolutions.