DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17809344
title: GVCCC: Global 500m 7-Day Vegetation Canopy Chlorophyll Content Products from MERIS and OLCI Imagery since 2003

description: The Global Vegetation Canopy Chlorophyll Content (GVCCC) product since 2003 provides global-scale estimates of canopy Chlorophyll Content (CCC) at a spatial resolution of 500 meters and a temporal resolution of 7 days. This v.30 version of the GVCCC dataset is derived from surface reflectance observations collected by ENVISAT MERIS (2003–2012) and Sentinel-3 OLCI (2018–2020), utilizing the MODIS sinusoidal tiling scheme. All data of the GVCCC product are divided into multiple Zenodo datasets, and subsequent datasets can be retrieved via Zenodo, for example: "GVCCC: Global 500m 7-Day Products of Vegetation Canopy Chlorophyll Content Derived from MERIS and OLCI Imagery Since 2003: Part 2".

CCC refers to the total weight of chlorophyll in vegetation canopy per unit ground area. CCC serves as a critical biophysical indicator reflecting vegetation growth conditions. Accurate estimation of CCC is essential for monitoring plant physiological status, evaluating vegetation productivity, detecting environmental stressors, assessing ecosystem health, and modeling carbon cycling processes in terrestrial ecosystems. 

GVCCC generation integrates multi-source satellite data, including top-of-canopy reflectance from MERIS and OLCI sensors and the MERIS Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index (MTCI). Additionally, auxiliary datasets such as global vegetation type and vegetation clumping index products are incorporated. A machine learning-based inversion framework is employed to estimate CCC, leveraging the 4SCALE and PROSAIL radiative transfer models to simulate canopy reflectance under varying structural and biochemical conditions. The CCC unit is micrograms per square centimeter (μg/cm²), the scaling factor is 10, meaning that CCC = DN / 10. The invalid data value is -10,000.

Below are the names of the TIFF files for the CCC products from ENVISAT MERIS and Sentinel-3 OLCI. Here, the sensor abbreviations MERIS and S3OLC stand for ENVISAT MERIS and Sentinel-3 OLCI, respectively. The date "20030305" represents the first day of a 7-day interval, formatted as YYYYMMDD. "ESACCI-LC-L3-SR" represents the key information of the input satellite reflectance data. "v3.0" indicates the version number of GVCCC dataset. The GVCCC dataset was first released on the National Earth System Science Data Center (http://wdcrre.data.ac.cn/data/9a006) in 2022, marking its third updated v3.0 version, and it will be released again in 2025.

    CCC-ESACCI-LC-L3-SR-MERIS-500m-P7D-h02v06-20030305-v3.0-MODISTile.tif

    CCC-ESACCI-LC-L3-SR-S3OLC-500m-P7D-h00v09-20190305-v3.0-MODISTile.tif

Dataset Characteristics:

·Spatial Coverage: Global

·Temporal Coverage: 2003-2012, 2018-2020

·Spatial Resolution: 500 m

·Temporal Resolution: 7 day

·Projection: Sinusoidal

·Data Format: tif

·Scale: 0.1

·Valid Range: 0 – 10000

·unit: μg/cm²

Citation (Please cite this paper whenever these data are used):

Sun, Q., Jiao, Q., Liu, L., Liu, X., Qian, X., Zhang, X., Zhang, B. (2021). Improving the retrieval of forest canopy chlorophyll content from MERIS data by introducing the vegetation clumping index. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 14(3), 034504.