Multi-year global land cover mapping at 300 m and characterization for climate modelling: achievements of the Land Cover component of the ESA Climate Change Initiative

Abstract. Essential Climate Variables were listed by the Global Climate Observing System as critical information to further understand the climate system and support climate modelling. The European Space Agency launched its Climate Change Initiative in order to provide an adequate response to the set of requirements for long-term satellite-based products for climate. Within this program, the CCI Land Cover project aims at revisiting all algorithms required for the generation of global land cover products that are stable and consistent over time, while also reflecting the land surface seasonality. To this end, the land cover concept is revisited to deliver a set of three consistent global land cover products corresponding to the 1998-2002, 2003-2007 and 2008-2012 periods, along with climatological 7-day time series representing the average seasonal dynamics of the land surface over the 1998-2012 period. The full Envisat MERIS archive (2003-2012) is used as main Earth Observation dataset to derive the 300-m global land cover maps, complemented with SPOT-Vegetation time series between 1998 and 2012. Finally, a 300-m global map of open permanent water bodies is derived from the 2005-2010 archive of the Envisat Advanced SAR imagery mainly acquired in the 150m Wide Swath Mode.