News and Events

ImagineS Annual Review on 12th February in Brussels

The meeting has a twofold objective: 1) check that the project is on time; 2) see whether it needs to adapt the work plan for the last year and check the project is still in line with the EC expectations.

Besides REA and its appointed reviewer, Dr. C. Atzberger from BOKU Vienna, a representative of the Copernicus Unit of DG Growth attended the meeting.

ImagineS partners have presented the progress of the work, and the achievements of the second year related to the retrieval methodologies of biophysical variables, crop mapping and Land Data Assimilation System (LDAS). The LAI/FAPAR/FCover processing line using PROBA-V 333m data has been delivered to the Copernicus Global Land Service that should start soon an operational production over Europe. The Albedo processing chain using PROBA-V 333m data is under consolidation and should be delivered to the Global Land service in the next weeks. The LDAS-France has been consolidated and is now used for the regular (every 6 months) quality monitoring across variables in the Copernicus Global Land service. Comparison between LDAS ouputs over selected sites in France, Hungary and Europe with the output of the WOFOST model used in MARS unit of JRC for agricultural reporting have been initiated: results still need to be consolidated. Pre-seasonal crop maps and crop group maps have been generated over Tula area in Russia and the Free State Province in South Africa. Preliminary crop type maps along the season exists over Tula but need to be refined. Over Free State Province, the in-situ data necessary to calibrate the method should be available soon, thanks to a collaboration with Agricultural Research Council. The field campaigns to collect ground measurements of LAI, FAPAR and FCover have been continued in 2014, in collaboration with local institutions or in collaboration with other FP7 project (e.g. ERMES project). As soon as the data are processed and up-scaled to get high resolution maps, used as reference for the validation of EO-derived products, they are made available for the community on the ImagineS website.

During 2014, it became clear that no nominal Sentinel-3 nor Sentinel-2 data would be available before the end of the project due to the delay in the launch of satellites. So, the work plan has been adapted consequently: PROBA-V and Landsat-8 images are then used as proxies of S3 and S2 data, respectively. Further, it has been decided that the high resolution multi-sensor products will be provided over some demonstration sites, chosen according to the involvement of local users to perform an utility assessment exercise. The user uptake will be  enhanced in the last period of the project. In particular, some specific training session (biophysical products, LDAS) will be organized, including jointly with other initiatives (e.g. Global Land service, MESA project)