LAI and fAPAR CYCLOPES global products derived from VEGETATION. Part 2: validation and comparison with MODIS collection 4 products

The main objective of this paper is the validation of CYCLOPES version 3.1 LAI and fAPAR products. It is achieved by the comparison with MODIS collection 4 and 4.1 products and ECOCLIMAP LAI climatology over the BELMANIP representative set of sites, and with ground measurements over a limited set of sites. Great attention is paid to the consistency of the comparison: for the spatial dimension, product PSF appears to be the main aspect governing the spatial resolution at which the comparison has to be achieved. For CYCLOPES, a minimal size of the sites should be 3 km × 3 km2, while the optimal one is 10 km × 10 km2; regarding the temporal sampling interval and resolution, the problem is much easier to solve when assuming a relatively smooth time course of vegetation characteristics (8–16 days). Great care was also paid to the departure of products from the nominal definition, particularly for LAI where different scales of clumping have to be considered.Results showed that CYCLOPES and MODIS products have generally consistent seasonality, CYCLOPES being however characterized by a smoother temporal evolution as expected. Differences are mainly concentrated on the magnitude of products values, CYCLOPES achieving better performances both for LAI (RMSE = 0.73) and fAPAR (RMSE = 0.10) over the limited number of sites where ground measurements were available. This study also sets a framework to the validation exercise that could be used to evaluate other products or future versions of the same products and contribute to associate quantitative uncertainties as required by the user community.