earth online

PROBA-V QWG meeting 15

09-Jun - 10-Jun 2022

Hybrid event

The main topics of the meeting were recalled with summary of current status and open points for discussion:

Mission Status and Calibration:  Proba-V mission successfully fulfilled its main objective to guarantee continuity to the SPOT-VGT data record bridging the gap to S3 for land applications. Since July 1st, 2020, PROBA-V operated as an experimental mission due to the declining overpass time only acquiring the European and African continent together with ad-hoc acquisitions campaigns. On 31st of October 2021, this experimental phase was stopped as well.  The vegetation instrument was switched to standby mode and limited maintenance calibration segments are acquired with the rationale of monitoring the temporal stability of the sensor and the instruments’ health status. The Proba-V Moon calibrations covering the full Moon cycle repeated in the last months and the plan is to keep gathering valuable data in support of the development and validation of ESA Lunar Irradiance Model (LIME). The platform and payload performances need to be monitored to ensure instrument readiness at the time of PV-CC launch for exploiting potential synergies even if limited due to the orbital drift. During the meeting the radiometric and geometric calibrations activities will be reviewed.

Collection 2: the schedule for C2 release has changed due to a higher processing time required by the new cloud masking and atmospheric correction modules. Ad-hoc HW upgrades have been implemented to speed-up the reprocessing phase and allow an early access to the applications waiting this dataset. The first validation phase was successfully completed with global processing of 5 dates where clearly improvements both in the cloud masking and atmospheric corrections results have been highlighted. The second phase has been also completed, with the processing of the period July 2018-June 2019 after which a full validation against MODIS data was performed. During the meeting the latest C2 validation results and the schedule for the C2 data processing will be discussed as well as the best approach for the future C3 baseline in the frame of a reprocessing project for a VGT-PV harmonized and consistent archive (FDR-like). 

Continuity: the last updates of SYN L2 IPF allow to fix some issues detected during the validation activity performed by VITO, other issues are being considered and will be analysed during the meeting. The CGLS biophysical products processing chain switched to S3 and the analysis on S3-Proba-V consistency is being performed by CGLS based on the early access to C2 data.

Proba-V Companion Cubesat: the PV-CC activities are on-going at ASL and some critical issues caused several delays with resulting shift in the foreseen timeline. The launch is currently planned with VEGA, the launch window starts on 1/1/2023The PDGS processing chain verification is on-going thanks to a collaboration between ESA, ASL and VITO, all progresses are being followed up in regular coordination meetings. Due to the new timeline, there are no more chances of exploiting a synergy with Proba-V whose LTDN will be around 7:30 AM in December 2022 and the exploitation plan for the mission needs to be re-assessed with focus on Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3. To this end, a survey within the user community is encouraged to gather all feedback and new proposal on the PV-CC data exploitation.

Tweet