The service will focus on development of a system to generate global estimates of the following:

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

The system will focus initially on six complete years, from 1998 to 2003, when overlap exists between the VEGETATION and ERS-2 (ATSR-2) systems (from 1998) and VEGETATION and ENVISAT (AATSR, MERIS). However because the objective is to develop a flexible service that is not dependent on any single satellite system, other sensor systems can be introduced e.g. MODIS, AVHRR, MSG and therefore the processing system can be retrospectively applied to existing archives and used with future satellite systems.

JRC is making a significant contribution to the project:

• Provision of VEGETATION algorithm for burn areas: based on a selection of algorithms used in the GBA-200 project;
• Contribution to the ATSR algorithm;
• Participation to the burnt areas products validation.