An update on the globcarbon initiative: Multi-sensor estimation of global biophysical products for global terrestrial carbon studies

The ESA GLOBCARBON project aims to generate fully calibrated estimates of at-land products quasi-independent of the original Earth Observation source for use in Dynamic Global Vegetation Models, a central component of the IGBP-IHDP-WCRP Global Carbon Cycle Joint Project. The service features global estimates of: burned area, fAPAR, LAI and vegetation growth cycle. The demonstrator focused on six complete years, from 1998 to 2003 when overlap exists between ESA Earth Observation sensors (ATSR-2, AATSR and MERIS) and the French SPOT VEGETATION sensor and was extended to process 10 years up to 2007. After analysis, by the beta user community, of the first products the implementation of the algorithms was revisited and a reprocessing initiated. This paper provides details of the GLOBCARBON project and its revised algorithms, describes the re-processed products and gives initial results of their validation.