Land Long Term Climate Data Records from AVHRR, MODIS and VIIRS

The Land Long Term Climate Data Records project at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) generates, archives, and distributes high quality Climate Data Records (CDR) from data acquired by Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) for use in long term global climate change studies. The AVHRR portion of this CDR has been released by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center CDR project in Spring 2014. Processing of data from these multi-resolution instruments has generated long-term consistent data records spanning a period of nearly 32 years. These records contain daily surface reflectance as the fundamental CDR, and daily Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) and LAI/FPAR as two thematic CDRs (TCDRs) derived from the fundamental CDR. The entire data record has recently been reprocessed with refined algorithms that incorporated the latest scientific findings from analysis of the earlier version of the data records. Since the inception of the project in 2004, these records have been reprocessed several times with introduction of the continuation records from MODIS in Version 3 (V3). The processing of the V4.2 has been released to the public in early summer 2014. The latest version V4.3 is incorporating the results of a new inter-calibration technique that enables consistency and stability below the percent level and is demonstrated using the MODIS Terra/Aqua and VIIRS daily surface reflectance climate data record. This presentation describes the actual and future improvement to these AVHRR climate data records as well as a second AVHRR TCDR i.e. the daily LAI/FPAR (released in November 2014). In addition to the detailed analysis of the performance of those CDR (QA/Validation) we will present some application of the use of the AVHRR CDR's to forest cover change and agriculture monitoring.