Vegetation earth system data record from DSCOVR EPIC observations,

Abstract

The NASA's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) onboard NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) mission was launched on February 11, 2015 to the Sun-Earth Lagrangian L1 point where it began to collect radiance data of the entire sunlit Earth every 65 to 110 min in June 2015. It provides imageries in near backscattering directions at ten ultraviolet to near infrared narrow spectral bands. The DSCOVR EPIC science product suite includes vegetation Earth system data record (VESDR) that provides leaf area index (LAI) and diurnal courses of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), sunlit LAI (SLAI), fraction of incident photosynthetically active radiation (FPAR) absorbed by the vegetation and Directional Area Scattering Function (DASF). The parameters at 10-km sinusoidal grid and 65-110 min temporal frequency are generated from the upstream EPIC MAIAC surface reflectance product. The DSCOVR EPIC science team also provides two ancillary science data products derived from 500m MODIS land cover type 3 product: 10 km Land Cover Type and Distribution of Land Cover Types within 10 km EPIC pixel. All products were released on June-7-2018 and publicly available from the NASA Langley Atmospheric Science Data Center (https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/project/dscovr/dscovr_epic_l2_vesdr_01). This presentation provides an overview of the EPIC VESDR research, which includes descriptions of the algorithm and product, initial assessment of its quality and obtaining new information on vegetation properties from the VESDR product.