ESA Biomass Climate Change Initiative (Biomass_cci): Global datasets of forest above-ground biomass for the years 2010, 2017 and 2018, v3

This dataset comprises estimates of forest above-ground biomass for the years 2010, 2017 and 2018. They are derived from a combination of Earth observation data, depending on the year, from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, Envisat’s ASAR instrument and JAXA’s Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS-1 and ALOS-2), along with additional information from Earth observation sources. The data has been produced as part of the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme by the Biomass CCI team. This release of the data is version 3. Compared to version 2, this is a consolidated version of the Above Ground Biomass (AGB) maps. This version also includes a preliminary estimate of AGB changes for two epochs. The data products consist of two (2) global layers that include estimates of: 1) above ground biomass (AGB, unit: tons/ha i.e., Mg/ha) (raster dataset). This is defined as the mass, expressed as oven-dry weight of the woody parts (stem, bark, branches and twigs) of all living trees excluding stump and roots 2) per-pixel estimates of above-ground biomass uncertainty expressed as the standard deviation in Mg/ha (raster dataset) In addition, files describing the AGB change between 2018 and the other two years are provided (labelled as 2018_2010 and 2018_2017). These consist of two sets of maps: the standard deviation of the AGB change and a quality flag of the AGB change. Note that the change itself can be simply computed as the difference between two AGB maps, so is not provided directly. Data are provided in both netcdf and geotiff format.