For the second consecutive southern hemisphere summer season, PROBA-V observed Antarctica and its ongoing changes. Observations on the continent’s land and sea ice surfaces were performed from 12 November 2018 – 18 February 2019. At various places, large ice sheets are calving off the major glaciers and these processes were well observed by PROBA-V.

The PROBA-V images above clearly show an example of this calving process. They show an ice sheet with an area of ~300 km² calving off the Pine Island Glacier.

PROBA-V’s Antarctica data are available at 100 m,
300 m, and 1 km resolutions in HDF5 format from the PROBA-V Mission Exploitation Platform Virtual Machines, proba-v-mep.esa.int, as well as from our Product Distribution Portal, www.vito-eodata.be.

While PROBA-V is going into its last operational year, preparations on a second reprocessing campaign that is planned to start around mid-2020, are ongoing. Major updates to the PROBA-V data products will involve improvements to the cloud and cloud shadow detection algorithms, improved aerosol input data for the atmospheric correction method, as well as the release of a BRDF correction tool.

Finally, we announce the release of a PROBA-V surface reflectance reference dataset obtained using a sophisticated algorithm (Combined Inversion of Surface and AeRosols, CISAR) developed by the Belgian company Rayference. The algorithm was applied to PROBA-V observations over 50 Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) sites and spans the period 2014 – 2015. The dataset and its accompanying documentation are available from the PROBA-V MEP Virtual Machines.