When it comes to predicting what our climate will be like in the future, vegetation matters. Plants...
When it comes to predicting what our climate will be like in the future, vegetation matters.
Accounting for vegetation growth is clearly important in the complex climate puzzle - and the release of a new satellite dataset is set to help climate modellers with the challenge of evaluating the impacts of climate change.
Climate modellers rely on satellite data to assess the health and growth of the world's vegetation.
ESA's Climate Change Initiative's latest data release provides a consistent time series to meet modellers' needs.
Both are key to describing the pattern and rate of vegetation growth and sit alongside 53 other recognised Essential Climate Variables that are used by science and policy circles to monitor the climate.
The dataset is available at 1 km grid resolution over five-day intervals - sufficient for use in global carbon and climate models.
"Climate modellers place great emphasis on the quality of the input data they use. The more precisely they can quantify the accuracy of this information, the more confidence they can have in their forward-looking projections," explains Christiaan van der Tol of Twente University in the Netherlands and science leader of the Climate Change Initiative Vegetation Parameters project.
"Dr van der Tol adds,"We have satisfied the target requirements defined by the Global Climate Observing System in this first release and provide a five-day time step compared to the eight-to-10-day time of existing datasets.
The data are unsmoothed, so while being 'noisier' than some other datasets, this may be useful to detect and investigate sudden events, such as disturbance from fire or harvest.
The dataset is produced by the ESA Climate Change Initiative's Vegetation Parameters project, one of 27 R&D projects dedicated to developing robust satellite climate data records that provide the observed evidence to understand the climate and underpin the tools and decisions used to tackle the negative consequences of a changing climate.