VEGETATION - 2000

Lake Maggiore - Italy, 3-6 April 2000

SPACE-VEGETATION SOFTWARE :
A software for pre-processing VEGETATION L-Band Data

César CARMONA-MORENO
European Commission, Joint Research Center, Space Applications Institute
Global Vegetation Monitoring Unit
e-mail : cesar.carmona-moreno@jrc.it ; http://www.mtv.sai.jrc.it/

Paper (pdf file, 205 k)

The VEGETATION Programme allows a daily monitoring of terrestrial vegetation cover through remote sensing, at regional and global levels. The instrument, funded by the EC at 50%, is part of the SPOT 4 payload. This satellite, launched the 24th Mars 1998, deliver measurements which were specifically tailored to monitor land surfaces’ parameters with a frequency of about once a day on a global basis and a medium spatial resolution of 1 kilometre (2200 Km swath width and 300m of geolocation accuracy).

The associated ground services for processing and distribution are full operational since the end of 1998 where two ground processing services:

The Centralise/Global Processing is performed by the CTIV (Centre de Traitement d’Images VEGETATION at Mol – Belgium). This Centralise Ground Segment will process instrument measurements at global scale to offer standard high quality products to the general users’ community. The daily global VEGETATION data (VGT) are downlinked via VEGETATION X-Band transmission in Kiruna (Sweden) and transmit them to the CTIV for processing.

The Local Processing is performed by the local VEGETATION L-Band receiving stations with a specialised pre-processing system called SPACE-VGT. The VGT L-Band product has 1Km of geolocation accuracy and the radiometry accuracy is equivalent to that of VGT-P products. These products are mainly addressed to a user’ community with particular thematic needs where the (near-) real-time access to VEGETATION data drive their applications.

This presentation deals with a description (functional and architectural) of the SPACE-VGT software. The Joint Research Centre – Space Application Institute has full developed the local L-Band pre-processing chain and this software will be delivered free of charge to the VEGETATION programme. This will be distributed to the officially VEGETATION registered users by SPOT-Image.

In a general way, local VEGETATION L-Band receiving stations demodulate and store local VGT Level 0 image data files from the L-Band transmission of the VEGETATION instrument. The software processes these local VGT Level 0 data files to produce a pre-processed product. The solar and instrument (zenith and azimuth) angles associated to each pixel are also stored.

A detailed presentation of this system, its scientific objectives, data input/output description, image radiometric/geometric accuracy and pre-processing algorithms will be made. During the VGT-2000 meeting a demonstration of this system will be available.