New global land cover mapping exercise in the framework of the ESA Climate Change Initiative

The ESA Climate Change Initiative land cover project focuses on the deriving land cover information driven by requirements for observing Essential Climate Variables. Consultation mechanisms were established with the climate modelling community in order to identify its specific needs in terms of satellite-based global land cover products. Key findings were the needs for successive land cover maps stable over time. As response, an innovative global land cover mapping approach, based on multi-year MERIS and SPOT-Vegetation datasets is proposed. Pre-processing and classification chains able to handle huge amount of data have been developed and a first global land cover map associated to the 2008-2010 epoch is being produced.