GBOV (Ground-Based Observation for Validation): A Copernicus Service for Validation of Vegetation Land Products

The Copernicus Ground-Based Observations for Validation (GBOV) service aims to develop and distribute robust in-situ datasets from a selection of ground-based monitoring sites for a systematic and quantitative validation of Earth Observation (EO) land products. The EO land products of particular interest are those from the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS), but GBOV data usage is not restricted to CGLS products and is fully open to the entire community, following the general Copernicus data policy. In this paper, a global overview of GBOV service is shown, and the attention is focused on the vegetation type products: Leaf Area Index (LAI), Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Available Radiation (FAPAR) and the Fraction of Covered ground (FCover). An introduction of the algorithm implemented to compute these products, mainly from upscaling of ground-based observation with high resolution satellite images, is presented.