VEGETATION/SPOT: an operational mission for the Earth monitoring; presentation of new standard products

The VEGETATION instrument is the starting point of a European Earth monitoring system that was developed jointly by France, the European Commission, Belgium, Italy and Sweden. Since April 1998, VEGETATION has provided a high quality global monitoring of the day-to-day land cover dynamics at 1 km resolution. The whole dataset is now available free of charge to the broad range of potential users and applications. The quality of delivered products in terms of radiometry, geometry and additional processing for directional and atmospheric effects stands VEGETATION as an excellent tool for the monitoring of surface hydrology, crops, forest and land cover. Surface reflectances that are delivered by the operational VEGETATION system are corrected for molecular and aerosol scattering, for water vapour, ozone and other gas absorption. So far, the only well known Maximum Value Composite (MVC) technique was used in the construction of 10-day synthesis. An additional enhanced composite product is now available, which evaluates the atmospheric optical depth and normalizes angular Sun-target-sensor variations. After presenting the VEGETATION instrument and products, this paper introduces the new compositing schemes ( Duchemin and Maisongrande 2002, Duchemin et al. 2002 ) and presents samples of the new products.