NASA Logo, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
LPVS website banner

 

LPV Supersites

CEOS land validation sites

The CEOS Land Product Validation subgroup adopted the EOS Land Validation core sites back in the early MODIS era, and augmented the list with more European and international coverage in the mid 2000's. But many of these sites were not longer active, and our needs and strategy for ground reference sites have changed over time. The LPV thus undertook an effort to define and evaluate several study sites that could fulfill the needs of multple products within our focus areas.

We have defined sites that we refer to as LPV Supersites as:

  • Super characterized (canopy structure and bio-geophysical variables) site following well- established protocols useful for the validation of satellite land products (at least 3) and for radiative transfer modeling approaches.
  • Active, long-term operations, supported by appropriate funding and infrastructural capacity.
  • Supported by airborne LiDAR and hyperspectral acquisitions (desirable).

The supersites were selected primarily from well known and established networks, and several were also nominated by each of the LPV focus areas, and then all sites were evaluated for their suitability by ranking them first based on the availability of data (active site) and their spatial representativeness. After this the variables were ranked based on how many key variables could be validated with a given site, whether structural information were available for the site, and if atmospheric and other properties were measured. The sites were also ranked according to global region and by land cover. All of this information was combined to come up with a score for each site and a cut-off was established for accepting a given site. The subset of sites that we have initially adopted using this criteria are shown on the map below, and in this spreadsheet.

Note that access to all ICOS site data is not yet fully operational (expected for 2020).

Network Visibility:
NASA Logo - nasa.gov