The final agenda for the upcoming DevCoCast-AMESD training workshop is now available
here, along with the announcement.
As of next Tuesday, Jan 19th, Level 3 MODIS and MERIS Ocean colour products from Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) will become routinely available on EUMETCast′s DEVCOCAST-1 channel.
MODIS products are generated twice, for 2 areas per day. MERIS products are generated once per day, for the same 2 areas.
File sizes are 5 MB on average.
They are in netCDF format and named PML_<instr>_<area>_<passtime>.nc, with:
<instr> = modis or meris
<area> = ghana or mauritania
<passtime> = time of the satellite overpass
For more information, please visit the NEODAAS web site, or contact the PML team at devcocast@pml.ac.uk, the DevCoCast help desk or have a look at EUMETSAT′s Product Navigator.
Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2010 to you all!
From the VITO DevCoCast team
As of next Monday, Dec 21st, the first 5 INPE products will become routinely available on EUMETCast's DEVCOCAST-1 channel. These include:
The products are in JPEG format and have typical filenames of the form
INPE_XXX_YYYYMMDDHHmm.JPG, with XXX being FDG, FDN, FTC, LDI or UVI.
Frequency for FDG, FTC and LDI is every 15 minutes. UVI is generated every 30 minutes (during daylight hours) and FDN files are generated once per day.
For more information, please contact the INPE team at atusdsa@cptec.inpe.br, the DevCoCast help desk or have a look at EUMETSAT′s Product Navigator.
The Lowveld Fire Danger Index (LFDI) and McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index (FFDI) products from CSIR′s Meraka Institute are available via EUMETCast as of today. These are the first products that DevCoCast adds to EUMETCast and that operationally flow from Africa, through the central hubs and then to EUMETSAT for the EUMETCast broadcast. They are available everywhere in the EUMETCast footprint - Africa, Europe and the Americas.
Access is free. Selling the received data is prohibited and users are requested to give reference to the data source whenever the products are used.
They are available on the DEVCOCAST-1 channel, PID 300 in Europe and Africa or PID 1922 in the Americas.
To register for these products, please contact the
EUMETSAT Help desk.
With the VGT4Africa project finished, the GEONETCast for and by Developing Countries (DevCoCast) project will continue the user support and training efforts and bring much more, including free, stand-alone training packages, discussion forums,...!
This means that the web address of this web site will change from http://www.vgt4africa.org to http://www.devcocast.eu, so please update your bookmarks by end of October 2009!
The production and delivery of products will of course continue and the logins to download the data are not affected. You will see an important change in the content of the web pages.
If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk.
The DMP and VPI processing system is upgraded, the missing DMP and VPI products have been completed and back processing has started up.
Due to an upgrade of both products, the VPI and DMP for the
last 10-day period of August are delayed and will only be available
in the week of September 7th.
At that time, we'll also start to reprocess the entire archive of DMP and VPI, which will
be completed by the end of this year.
A document explaining the reasons for the upgrade of both products to
new versions, is in preparation and will be sent to you shortly.
In brief, VPI is re-calculated using a new historical average, that now encompasses 10-years of SPOT-VEGETATION data and DMP is re-calculated based on new, validated fAPAR and improved, validated meteo data.
We apologize for any inconvenience that is caused by this interruption.
The Albedo error products - ALBE - are temporarily unavailable as they are being moved to a new hard disk. They will be available again on Monday July 10th.
A new version of VGTExtract, version 1.3.3, is available for download. The main changes include:
- update of Envi output format, so it reads properly in GDAL, OpenEV and FWTools
- fixed the bug that caused faulty North and East boundaries when manual geographic region settings are used
- manual geographic region settings now allow finer control by using 10 decimal digits
- popup menu to explore properties of products and datasets has been restored and improved
- saving of changes to settings has been improved
- switching between manual, pre-defined and map selected geographic region settings now works more intuitively
Feel free to download and enjoy this new version!
Version 1.2, build 2 (or 1.2.2 in short) of the VGTExtract software is now available. The most important changes with respect to the previous release, 1.1.43, are:
- 3 additional output formats: ILWIS (.mpr), IDRISI (.rst) and ArcInfo ASCIIGrid (.txt)
- improved testing and use of scale, offset and no value flag parameters
- fixed bugs in checks of processing settings
- updated default data types for the solar/viewing angle datasets (full S10 products)
- update of the VITO logo.
Unfortunately, the website suffered from several outages recently. An update of the website code, performed earlier today, should help prevent future downtime.
The LAI, fCover and ALBEDO production has suffered some delays as well. We do our best to keep them to a minimum, but the cause is not always under our control. An example is the auxiliary meteo data for which we depend on NASA.
We do apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
Yesterday, January 29 2009, good news arrived in the VGT4Africa family.
Tim Jacobs, project leader of VGT4Africa, became the proud father of his first son, named Thomas.
Thomas, Mom and of course "Daddy Timmy" are all doing well.
For the moms amongst us: Thomas is weighting 3,100kg and is 48cm long.
For the dads amongst us: they serve real champaign at Tim's place!
Congratulations to Tim and the whole family!
On behalf of VITO and the other project partners, I wish you all a Happy New Year!
The LAI, FCOVER and Albedo products are now disseminated operationally at the usual 10-day interval. Please note that, in view of the file sizes, the LAI, FCOVER and Albedo data is spread accross multiple products (ZIP files):
- LAI products contain LAI data and error budget;
- FCOVER products contain FCOVER data and error budget;
- BIOQ products contain quality information related to LAI and FCOVER;
- BBDHRT, BBDHRV, BBDHRN contain the albedo data for total (300-3000nm) wavelength range, visible wavelength range and near-infrared wavelength range resp;
- ALBE products contain the error budgets for BBDHRT, BBDHRN and BBDHRV data
- ALBQ products contain quality information for the albedo data.
From tomorrow evening until Sunday evening, power maintenance here at VITO will cause the website to be offline. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this causes.
As many of you have noticed, the website has undergone some small changes to make it more user-friendly. A few examples:
- the Images entry in the Download menu on the left has been renamed to Products.
- the Products entry was then moved to the top place in the Download menu.
- the Files entry was renamed to Project Files to make it clearer that these files are downloadable for project partners only.
- the labels and entries in the product search form have been improved, renaming for instance ROI to Geographic Region and All to either All Types or All Regions respectively.
If you find these changes confusing or if you have other suggestions / comments on the website, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk at info@vgt4africa.org.
The final activity report of the VGT4Africa project is now available on the Documents page.
Yesterday, a problem that prevented the access of several products, including the PHENOKS data of 2007 and multiple BIOQ products, was discouvered and corrected. All products should now be accessible for download. If you are having trouble accessing the data, please do not hesitate to contact the help desk (see the "Contact us" page for the contact details of the help desk).
The complete archive of DMP and VPI data has been reprocessed to fix the quality problem. The withdrawn products are now available again.
DMP and VPI products are now made available without further delays.
An improved version of DMP is expected for the end of this year or early next year.
This year, we celebrate 10 years of operational global vegetation monitoring by the SPOT-VEGETATION Programme (1998-2008).
If you're interested in attending the dedicated conference that will take place in Brussels, Belgium on December 9 and 10, 2008, then please visit the SPOT-VEGETATION web site.
The tests of the EUMETCast dissemination of the Phenology products were completed successfully, resulting in the operational dissemination of the Phenology data from March 1st 2008 onwards.
From today, the new LAI, FCOVER and Albedo products are processed operationally and are made available through this web site. Trials disseminations over EUMETCast are expected to start soon.
In addition to the 3 beforementioned withdrawn DMP and VPI products, the product from the 10-day period that starts on 2004-05-01 has now also been withdrawn due to poor quality. This product will also be reprocessed and replaced later on.
A new version of VGTExtract has been launched, called version 1.1.43.
The most important changes include:
- addition of version numbering
- support for the new Albedo and Biogeophysical (LAI and FCOVER) products
- default output extension were improved: extension is now .img for Envi format output and .ida for WinDisp IDA format output
- additional options for output file naming patterns, including 2- and 4-digit year, dekad number (01-36) and a custom, dataset specific code that can be entered in the Product Specific settings tab.
These changes simplify the integration with MARS-FOOD Application (MFA), requested by several users. The dataset specific custom codes are by default set to the values typically used in MFA. Integration can thus now be achieved by, for instance, simply using the output file name pattern vt%j%k%c%e.
The Small Water Body data of the last 10-day period of 2007 and the first of 2008 were
delivered later than usual, due to a technical issue that has now been solved.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
To allow for troublefree dissemination via EUMETCast and for easier downloads via the web site, the Phenology products are now split up into 3 parts:
- PHENOKS, or Phenology Key Stages, products contain the start & end date
of the last growing season and the season length.
- PHENOMAX, or Phenology Max NDVI, products contain the date of the
10-day period when the maximum NDVI value was reached during the
last season and that maximum NDVI value itself.
- PHENOMON, or Phenology Monitoring data, useful for validating the other Phenological parameters,
has been withdrawn and is currently under revision by the Joint Research Center (JRC).
Trial disseminations via EUMETCast of the PHENOKS and PHENOMAX products have started and should be finished soon.
As the Center for Processing of SPOT-VEGETATION data (CTIV), our primary data supplier of
the satellite measurements, has recently finished recalibrating all the data from the 2nd
VEGETATION instrument between the period Feb 2003 and June 2006,
we will gradually be updating most of our products accordingly.
DMPs and VPIs have been partially updated, but will be further improved in February.
3 decades of DMP and VPI have been withdrawn because of poor quality: 2004/06/01, 2004/06/11 and
2007/11/01. These 3 dekades will be restored in February as well.
CTIV has also corrected a geolocation accuracy issue with the data of October 2007.
All VGT4Africa data have been updated accordingly.
Please see http://www.vgt.vito.be/news/news.html for the latest news from CTIV.
We apologize for the inconveniences that these updates may cause.
Best wishes for 2008!
From the VGT4Africa partners VITO, JRC & MEDIAS-France
The Terms of Use and Privace Statements have been updated. Please make sure that you agree with the updated conditions before you use this website.
The new version of VGTExtract, available from this morning, contains the following changes and improvements:
- a fix of the geolocation in GeoTiff outputs, which was off by 1 pixel;
- a change of the photogrammetric interpretation Tiff tag, to avoid a bug in GDAL for GeoTiffs containing 32-bit integer values;
- a thorough review of file closing in an attempt to fix a bug reported by one of our users;
- Improved cleanup of temporary files, to prevent filling up the disk where VGTExtract is installed, which caused a somewhat misleading "not enough disk space" error. The related error message has also been revised.
- a few cosmetic changes, like the renaming of the button "Add" to "New" and improved logging messages;
- and, last but not least, the changes in predefined geographic regions, for consistency with the regions of the products available on the website and to make them fit better with country and region boundaries (see related Tech Note on the Documents page).
The 2nd VEGETATION instrument on board the Spot 5 satellite, was unavailable between 2007-09-06 13:16:52 UTC and 2007-09-12 00:16:37 UTC due to technical problems. Because of this the first dekad of September will only use 5.5 days of VGT2 data and the 2nd dekad 9 days (instead of 10).
VGT1 was temporarily reprogrammed in case it had to serve as backup solution during a prolonged VGT2 unavailability, but has resumed its regular measurements over the Poles now.
In the next few days, 10 of the 71 predefined geographic regions (ROIs) will be adjusted to improve their consistency with country or regional boundaries. The affected ROIs are: Botswana, Comoros, Eastern Africa, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Principe, Seychelles, Southern Africa, West Africa and CILSS.
The performed corrections are detailed in a technical note that you can download from the Documents page.
We apologize for this inconvenience.
The DMP product of the 10-day period starting on 2007-07-21 (all ROIs) was incorrectly produced and transmitted via EUMETCast.
Today, this faulty data has been corrected and the updated DMP product can be downloaded from this website.
We apologize for this inconvenience.
In order to improve the error messages, to correct bugs in the code, to add a few libraries necessary for running the program on Linux platforms, and most importantly to add support for the new Phenology products, the VGTExtract was updated yesterday evening. So please download the latest version.
The Phenology products are now produced operationally. All products of 2007 will become gradually available via this website in the coming days.
The trial dissemination via EUMETCast of these new products has also started and will hopefully result in operational dissemination soon.
From next Wednesday, April 25th 2007, the Small Water Body (SWB) products are provided via EUMETCast at the foreseen 10-day intervals. The first SWB product will be distributed via EUMETCast
in the first days of May.
As of yesterday, March 28th 2007, the Dry Matter Productivity and Vegetation Productivity Indicator products are provided via EUMETCast at the foreseen 10-day intervals.
Trial disseminations have started for the Small Water Body products as well.
The document that describes the configuration of the EUMETCast station for VGT4AFRICA data reception has been updated.
The Small Water Body product that contains data on the detection and seasonality of water bodies with a surface of at least 1 square kilometer, is now available for download.
Trial disseminations of these products via EUMETCast will start soon as well.
A bug in VGTExtract that kept the application running in background after closing the main window has been fixed now. Please download the updated version of VGTExtract.
The XML metadata has been updated for all NDWI, DMP and VPI products.
In addition, a new version of VGTExtract is available for download. This version not only
supports the metadata change, but also includes:
- a few bugfixes in the Envi output
- additional checks on the validity of the entered processing parameters
- and additional support for the WinDisp IDA output format.
The support for the IDA format makes it possible to use VGT4AFRICA data in WinDisp, a free
tool for data analysis and visualisation available from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations
this page.
Please note that WinDisp only supports 8-bit data, so all other data must be converted to 8-bit, using VGTExtract′s encoding parameters, in order to be usable in WinDisp.
Next Wednesday, January 16th, the website may be temporarily unavailable due to network maintenance. Sorry for any inconvenience.
The NDWI products have been updated to include the new ISO 19139 compliant XML metadata files.
These XML files replace the older logical volume descriptor (LOG.TXT) files.
