Near Real-Time Vegetation Monitoring at Global Scale

The NRT algorithm for near-real time estimation of global LAI, FAPAR, and FCOVER variables from SPOT/VEGETATION (VGT) satellite data is described here. It consists of three steps: 1) neural networks (NNT) (one for each variable) to provide instantaneous estimates from daily VGT-P reflectances; 2) a multistep filtering approach to eliminate data mainly affected by atmospheric effects and snow cover; and 3) Savitzky-Golay and climatology temporal smoothing and gap filling techniques to ensure consistency and continuity as well as short-term projection of the product dynamics. Performances of NRT estimates were evaluated by comparing with other products over the 2005-2008 period: 1) the offline estimates from the application of the algorithm over historical time series (HIST); 2) the geoland2 version 1 products also issued from VGT (GEOV1/VGT); and 3) ground data. NRT rapidly converges closely to the HIST processing after six dekads (10-day period) with major improvement after two dekads. Successive reprocessing will, therefore, correct for some instabilities observed in the presence of noisy and missing data. The root-mean-square error (RMSE) between NRT and HIST LAI is lower than 0.4 in all cases. It shows a rapid exponential decay with the number of observations in the composition window with convergence when 30 observations are available. NRT products are in good agreement with ground data (RMSE of 0.69 for LAI, 0.09 for FAPAR, and 0.14 for FCOVER) and consistent with GEOV1/VGT products with a significant improvement in terms of continuity (only 1% of missing data) and smoothness, especially at high latitudes, and Equatorial areas.