Early validation of PROBA-V GEOV1 LAI, FAPAR and FCOVER products for the continuity of the Copernicus Global Land Service

This study investigates the scientific quality of the GEOV1 Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FAPAR) and Fraction of Vegetation Cover (FCover) products based on PROBA-V observations. The procedure follows, as much as possible, the guidelines, protocols and metrics defined by the Land Product Validation (LPV) group of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellite (CEOS) for the validation of satellite-derived land products. This study is focused on the consistency of SPOT/VGT and PROBA-V GEOV1 products developed in the framework of the Copernicus Global Land Services, providing an early validation of PROBA-V GEOV1 products using data from November 2013 to May 2014, during the overlap period (November 2013-May 2014). The first natural year of PROBA-V GEOV1 products (2014) was considered for the rest of the quality assessment including comparisons with MODIS C5. Several criteria of performance were evaluated including product completeness, spatial consistency, temporal consistency, intra-annual precision and accuracy. Firstly, and inter-comparison with both spatial and temporal consistency were evaluated with reference satellite products (SPOT/VGT GEOV1 and MODIS C5) are presented over a network of sites (BELMANIP2.1). Secondly, the accuracy of PROBA-V GEOV1 products was evaluated against a number of concomitant agricultural sites is presented. The ground data was collected and up-scaled using high resolution imagery in the context of the FP7 ImagineS project in support of the evolution of Copernicus Land Service. Our results demonstrate that GEOV1 PROBA-V products were found spatially and temporally consistent with similar products (SPOT/VGT, MODISC5), and good agreement with limited ground truth data with an accuracy (RMSE) of 0.52 for LAI, 0.11 for FAPAR and 0.14 for FCover, showing a slight bias for FCover for higher values