Climatological study of Surface Cover optical properties – ECLIPS

Availibility of climatological databases for surface cover spectral optical properties is a challenge in many civilian themes, such as global warming, meteorological forecasting, ecophysiological processes, land surface hydrology or natural disaster assessment, and in military themes, such as trafficability, mission preparation or strategic survey.
Some surface cover reflectance databases built from satellite measurements over several years, with a global coverage, are available. They are climatologically representative but the spectral band extends only from visible to 3 µm at the most.
Within the framework of the MIRA PEA, a new global surface cover optical properties database was built from one year of MODIS data. This database has 9 spectral bands between 0.6 and 12.3 µm, a 8-days temporal sampling and a 500-m (1-km) spatial resolution for reflectance (emissivity). Because of the broken spectral coverage, the lack of climatological representativeness and the huge amount of data, the database is hard to process. However, it is the first step to create a global surface cover optical properties database, extending from visible to infrared (14 µm) with a climatological representativeness.
The CLIPO project aim is to develop methodologies for the creation of a global surface cover optical properties database which is representative of spatial, temporal and spectral variabilities and with resolutions in agreement with civilian and military needs. These methodologies will be implemented on a globe part in order to demonstrate the project feasibility. The implementation of the final product in radiative transfer codes, like the MATISSE code developed at ONERA, leads to significant work considering the database sizing.