The globcarbon initiative: Global biophysical products for global terrestrial carbon studies

Understanding the spatial and temporal variation in carbon fluxes is essential to constrain models that predict climate change. However, our current knowledge of spatial and temporal patterns is uncertain, particularly over land. The European Space Agency (ESA) GLOBCARBON project was initiated 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 Earth System Science Partnership's Global Carbon Project. The service features global estimates of: burned area, fAPAR, LAI and vegetation growth cycle for six complete years, from 1998 to 2007 when overlap exists between ESA Earth Observation sensors (ATSR-2, AATSR and MERIS) and the French SPOT VEGETATION sensor. This paper outlines the GLOBCARBON project, the Burned area and Leaf Area Index products, their validation and inter-comparison with equivalents.