GlobCarbon (Global Land Products for Carbon Model Assimilation)

GlobCarbon is a Data User Programme (DUP) project of the European Space Agency (ESA) to develop and demonstrate a service for the production of multi-year Global Level 3 Land Products derived from ATSR, MERIS, VEGETATION and AVHRR instruments data, that will be used as input to Carbon Model Assimilation.

GlobCarbon is developing a service to generate fully calibrated estimates of land products quasi-independent of the original Earth Observation source where that source is the data provided by ESA Earth Observation satellites plus a number of other sensors that are synergistic with those systems.

The service focuses on development of a system to generate global estimates of the following:

Fire � location, timing, area affected

fAPAR and LAI

Vegetation growth cycle � timing, duration, spatial and temporal variability

The system focuses initially on six complete years, from 1998 to 2003, when overlap exists between the VEGETATION and ERS-2 (ATSR-2) systems (from 1998) and VEGETATION and ENVISAT (AATSR, MERIS). However because the objective is to develop a flexible service that is not dependent on any single satellite system, other sensor systems can be introduced (e.g., MODIS, AVHRR, MSG) and therefore the processing system can be retrospectively applied to existing archives and used with future satellite systems.