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 The withdrawn products are now available again.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In addition to the 3 beforementioned withdrawn DMP and VPI products, the product from the 10-day period that starts on 2004-05-01 has now also been withdrawn due to poor quality.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.
