For the second consecutive austral summer season (see the 2018 news), PROBA-V observed Antarctica and its ongoing changes: observations on the continent's land and sea ice surfaces were performed from 12 November 2018 until 18 February 2019.

At various places, large ice sheets are calving off the major glaciers; two PROBA-V images were selected to show an example of this process: an ice sheet with an area of ~300 km2 calving off Pine Island Glacier.

The situation as of 19 November and 19 December 2018 is pictured in the images, with the black arrows indicating the gap between the glacier and the ice sheet, which clearly became larger over one month.

PROBA-V's Antarctica data are available at 100 m, 300 m, and 1 km resolutions in HDF5 format from the PROBA-V Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP) Virtual Machines, as well as from the PROBA-V Product Distribution Portal.

PROBA-V is going into its last operational year, preparations on a second reprocessing campaign that should start around mid-2020 are ongoing. Major updates to the Proba-V data products will involve improvements to the cloud and cloud shadow detection algorithms, improved aerosol input data for the atmospheric correction method, as well as the release of a BRDF correction tool.

Finally, a PROBA-V surface reflectance reference dataset has been released, obtained using a sophisticated algorithm (Combined Inversion of Surface and AeRosols, CISAR) developed by the Belgian company Rayference, and spanning the period 2014 – 2015. The dataset and its accompanying documentation are available from the PROBA-V MEP Virtual Machines.