Availability/Unavailability of EO datasets through the eStations

On 28/08/2020, the GMES & Africa google group led by the JRC announced that some new data sets have been added to the eStation catalog and that others will become temporarily unavailable, or no more available.  

PROBA-V products status

• With respect to the previous communication about PROBA-V end of operation, the NDVI indicator is now generated and disseminated only at the 1 km resolution.
• To allow the vegetation monitoring, JRC is complementing the product portfolio of the online platform (https://estation.jrc.ec.europa.eu/eStation2/) with additional products.
• The MODIS FAPAR product, long-term statistics, and z-score anomaly, generated by JRC D.5 Unit (see https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/gdo), has been added.
• In the upcoming days we will also make available the MODIS-derived NDVI and related anomalies, kindly from the Boku University (https://boku.ac.at/en/) in the online platform.

TAMSAT products

• TAMSAT RFE v3.0 is currently the reference product but cannot be retrieved on the MESA station because of the change in the distribution URL. If you relay on it for your analysis, please contact us to receive guidance to fix it in the MESA station. This fix will be part of the next eStation update, together with the 3.1 version, which will replace 3.0 at the end of 2020.

MODIS AQUA Oceanography data outage

• Since the 17th of August, the ground system started receiving corrupted data from the Aqua Spacecraft (see https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/forum/oceancolor/board_show.pl?bid=1).  Therefore, MODIS chla, kd490, PAR, SST products are currently unavailable with the stations. However the data will be again automatically received once the problem is sorted out on NASA-GSFC side.

PML MODIS datasets

• Since PML MODIS 1km data (Chl-a and SST) relay on the MODIS AQUA platform, these data are also currently unavailable. We suggest using the Sentinel-3 products based on OLCI and SLSTR.

This group has been set by the JRC team to keep the eStation users informed about the recent evolution of the Station and to easily communicate to the developers at the JRC. It publishes information when relevant, on a weekly or monthly basis.  Feel free to contact the JRC eStation Team on https://groups.google.com/g/gmesafrica or gmesafrica@googlegroups.com, for clarifications and guidance.

Former announcements of the JRC Google Group

• 24 august, Kind reminder to fill in the survey of the last training
  
• 20 August, access to the classroom, correct link
• 20 August, supporting materials, survey on the last workshop on tools for monitoring and forecasting floods and droughts
  
• 14 August, Workshop next week on 'Monitoring and forecasting droughts and floods and thier potential impacts'
• 4 August, Important: end of operations of PROBAV
  
• Etc..

The EU technical assistance to the GMES and Africa Programme
This assistance is assured in two ways: Locally and daily by a resident technical assistance team (TAT) and remotely and from time to time by the Joint Research Center notably but not exclusively on points regarding the eStations.  

The eStation

The eStation 2.0 is an Earth Observation processing system developed by the JRC since year 2009. The eStation is designed to automatically deal with the acquisition, processing, visualization and analysis of key environmental parameters derived from remotely sensed data. The measurements are, among others, obtained from the SPOT/PROBAV, SEVIRI/MSG, TERRA-AQUA/MODIS and Copernicus Sentinel 2 and 3 Earth Observation systems. Several hundreds of eStations have been installed in Africa during the AU EU joint Programmes AMESD, MESA and now GMES and Africa More