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Collection 1 Change Summary

As a result of major improvements to the cloud detection algorithm, a reprocessing campaign was planned. Together with these improvements, several other modifications to the PROBA-V data and metadata were included. Data files will be identified as .v1xx in the filenames, while the current available data collection (referred to as ‘Collection 0’) is identified as .v0xx.

All data from 16 October 2013 onwards is reprocessed, starting from the raw data. Further, all data is stored on disk in HDF5 and GeoTiff format for fast access. Further, for the first time the  intermediate Level 2A data products are made available to the users at all resolutions. The changes that were implemented during the reprocessing are described below.

1. Improved cloud detection algorithm

A new cloud detection algorithm was developed to improve on major detection issues in the operational algorithm. This change gives the most significant differences between the Collection 1 and Collection 0 data products. More information on the new cloud detection methodology can be found in Appendix B of the PROBA-V Collection 1 Product User Manual, while an extensive evaluation of the new cloud detection algorithm is given by Stelzer et al. (2016).

2. Updates to the radiometric ICP files

With changes to the radiometric ICP files, users benefit from improved reflectance values due to updated absolute calibration coefficients, a better inter-camera consistency, and an overall improvement of the radiometric pixel quality.

The changes that were made to the radiometric ICP files include:

  • Inter-camera adjustments to the VNIR absolute calibration coefficients;
  • The application of a degradation model to the SWIR absolute calibration coefficients;
  • Improvement of the low frequency multi-angular coefficients (i.e., equalization) for the SWIR strips of the CENTER camera;
  • Changes to the dark current values;
  • Minor changes to the status of bad pixels.

Users that are interested in more details on the above mentioned changes are referred to Appendix C of the PROBA-V Collection 1 Products User Manual.

3. Update product metadata for Climate Forecast (CF) compliancy

Metadata from 16 October 2013 to present will be made compliant to the Climate and Forecast metadata conventions (CF v1.6). In Collection 0, metadata was already compliant to these conventions for data from 6 January 2016 onwards. More details on the CF conventions can be found in Section 4.5 of the PROBA-V Collection 1 Products User Manual.

4. Fixes

The most important bug fixes that were applied were:

  • Bugfix to limit the impact of on-board compression errors for all data before July 2015.
  • Bugfix in the processing facility component to update the module that checks the satellite attitude data. Some data before 10 February 2016 might be incorrectly marked as ‘No data’.

Our Applications and Help

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Agriculture

For years, global food security has been at the forefront as one of the most pressing development targets. According to the FAO, food production around the world has to grow by more than 70% if we want to achieve food for all in 2050. Both public and private organizations bear a huge responsibility to raise food production in a sustainable way. Remote Sensing and especially satellite missions delivering daily global observations, like PROBA-V, are crucial to monitor the status of crops worldwide and predict yields.

Land Use / Land Cover

Land is an essential natural resource - for humanity and all terrestrial ecosystems. But while resources are strictly finite, human demands are not. Today, this leads to events such as deforestation, soil degradation and the loss of wildlife. PROBA-V, the small satellite for global observations, helps monitor and map the extent and dynamics of land cover and land use.

Climate

Global daily satellite observations are indispensable to monitor the driving forces of climate change, arguably the largest and most challenging problem our society is facing. Additionally, remote sensing serves to monitor the effects of climate change, e.g. changes in land cover and land use. Hereto PROBA-V satellite imagery with low spatial resolution but delivering daily global coverage is invaluable.

Coastal

Although PROBA-V is designed as a land mission, the good image quality provides opportunities to extend its applications to coastal waters.  By applying a dedicated atmospheric correction above water  we can derive information on the turbidity of the water and the suspended sediment concentration. Combining these turbidity and suspended sediment products from PROBA-V with products from other typical Ocean Colour sensors allows for better monitoring of turbidity in dynamic near shore areas and it increases the chance to detect short term events in particular for areas with rapid changing cloud cover.

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Collection 2 Products User Manual

Deprecated Collection 1 Products User Manual

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the SNAP PROBA-V Toolbox

consists of a rich set of visualisation, analysis and processing tools for the exploitation of the VEGETATION instrument. As a multi-mission remote sensing toolbox, it also supports the Sentinel missions, Envisat (MERIS & AATSR), ERS (ATSR), SMOS as well as third party data from MODIS (Aqua and Terra), Landsat (TM), ALOS (AVNIR & PRISM) and others. The various tools can be run from an intuitive desktop application or via a command-line interface. A rich application programming interface allows for development of plugins using Java or Python.