PROBA-V mission for global vegetation monitoring: standard products and image quality

PROBA-V is a new global vegetation monitoring mission, to be launched in the second quarter of 2013. PROBA-V has been developed to show a consistent performance with SPOT-VEGETATION (SPOT-VGT) data, with similar spectral bands but with an improved spatial resolution of 1/3km. The innovative mission concept has led to several key research topics related to image quality, which are discussed in this article. To support the existing VEGETATION user community, the data products for PROBA-V continue to provide daily top of canopy synthesis (S1-TOC) and 10 day synthesis products (S10-TOC). In addition, the new top of atmosphere daily synthesis (S1-TOA) products and a radiometrically/geometrically corrected (level 1C) product in raw resolution will also be provided for scientific users.