GlobCarbon developed a service for the generation of fully calibrated estimates of land products, quasi-independent of the original Earth Observation source. Data coming from ESA Earth Observation satellites and other sensors have been synergistically utilised in the production.

The service focused on the development of a system able to generate global estimates of the following information:

• Fire – location, timing, area affected
• fAPAR and LAI
• Vegetation growth cycle – timing, duration, spatial and temporal variability

The system focused initially on six complete years, from 1998 to 2003 and was expanded to provide a complete 10-year set of land products from 1998 to 2007. The main data sources are ATSR-2 (ERS-2), AATSR and MERIS (ENVISAT) and VEGETATION (SPOT), which have been used synergistically. The objective was to develop a flexible service that is not dependent on any single satellite system. Therefore data from other sensor systems can be also introduced and the processing system can be retrospectively applied to existing archives and used with future satellite systems as well.

The project was implemented by a large consortium led by VITO, with the partnership of many organisations and research centres: JRC, CESBIO, CTCD, IGBP and others.