During the Third Continuous Development and Operations Phase (CDOP-3) of EUMETSAT, the Satellite Application Facility (SAF) on Climate Monitoring (CM SAF, http://www.cmsaf.eu) has prepared the extension its products portfolio with a Thematic Climate Data Record (TCDR) of Regional Land Fluxes based on two sensors of the Meteosat suite of geostationary satellites: the Meteosat Visible and InfraRed Imager (MVIRI) and the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI). The Regional Land Fluxes TCDR will provide various parameters depicting the surface states and radiation fluxes, including the Surface Radiation Balance (SRB), the Cloud Fractional Cover (CFC), the Land Surface Temperature (LST), the Free Tropospheric Humidity (FTH), the Evapotranspiration (ET) and the Latent (LE) and Sensible Heat Fluxes (H). All these products are derived thanks to a joint retrieval shared between MeteoSwiss and the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI).

The LE and H fluxes are the largest heat sources for the atmosphere and are then significant for weather and climate dynamics. On the other hand, the ET is an important component of the land water budget and is therefore a key variable for agriculture and water management. Improving our knowledge of these products is now recognized as critical for further understanding of the Earth's climate system. Therefore, one of the main application areas of this new Regional Land Fluxes TCDR is the regional climate and climate change analysis.

We focus here on the ET, LE & H products that are currently developed at RMI through a close collaboration between CM SAF and LSA SAF (SAF on Land Surface Analysis).

The ET, LE & H retrieval is based on the methodology developed by the LSA SAF (Ghilain et al., 2011, 2012). Since 2009 and 2010 respectively, ET products are operationally delivered every 30 minutes and integrated daily within LSA SAF. The implemented algorithm relies on some of the parameterizations of the Tessel Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere Transfer (SVAT) scheme which has been reduced to its diagnostic components and modified to accept input data from external sources (Ghilain et al., 2011). For application within the CM SAF, this method has been evaluated and adapted to fulfill the requirements arising from the climate community (Ghilain et al., 2015). Robustness of this new method and algorithm is assessed by comparing the output products with existing state-of-the-art data records (satellite and ground-based). During CDOP-3, the processing was extended to the period of Meteosat First Generation.

The regional ET, LE & H TCDR will be provided over the Meteosat disk [-60°N/S – 60°E/W] at a spatial resolution of (0.05°). The data record, referred to as CM-23811 within CM SAF, extends from 1983 to 2020 (i.e. covering 32 years) and provides hourly, daily and monthly averages as well as monthly averages of the hourly integrated values (diurnal cycle).

The related activities were finalized in the first part of the CDOP-4 period (2022-2027). The dataset will be issued in 2023.

Current phase (CDOP-4): March 1, 2022 – February 28, 2027.

This project is dealing with a specific join activity of two RMI scientific services (1/ Observations and 2/ Meteorological and Climatological Research).

RMI participants: William Moutier, Alirio Arboleda, Miguel Barrios (all developers and scientists); both Nicolas Clerbaux and Françoise Meulenberghs (scientific coordination and administration).

Partner Institutions: MeteoSwiss (CH).

Funding source: EUMETSAT, ESA/Belgian Science Policy (ESA /Contract Nr.4000123961) and RMI.

From RMI CM SAF team:

Bourgeois, Q., Duguay-Tetzlaff, A., Stöckli, R., John, V., Lattanzio, A., Schulz, J., Hollmann, R., Trentmann, J., Clerbaux, N., Gellens-Meulenberghs, F., Ghilain, N., Urbain, M., Trigo, I., 2018: Regional Land Fluxes TCDR within the EUMETSAT Climate Monitoring SAF: Surface Radiation Budget. Poster presented at the EUMETSAT Meteorological Satellite Conference 2018, 17-21 September 2018, Tallinn, Estonia.

Ghilain, N., Arboleda, A., Stökli, R., Clerbaux, N. and Gellens-Meulenberghs, F. 2015: Climate data record of evapotranspiration and surface heat fluxes: a feasibility study based on joint LSA-SAF and CM-SAF capabilities (poster). Proceedings of the EUMETSAT meteorological satellite conference 2015, 21-25 September, Toulouse, France, 5 pp.

Moutier, W., Ghilain, N., Clerbaux, N., Gellens-Meulenberghs, F., Arboleda, A., Barrios, J. M., Duguay-Tetzlaff, A., Akkermans, T., Velazquez, A., Baudrez, E., Moreel, J. and Ipe, A., 2019: Surface soil moisture: toward a new combined dataset to maximize the use of satellite data (poster). Living Planet Symposium, 13-17th May, Milan, Italy.

Moutier, W., Ghilain, N., Urbain, M., Clerbaux, N., Gellens-Meulenberghs, F., Arboleda, A., Barrios, M., Bourgeois, Q., Duguay-Tetzlaff, A., Stöckli, R., Trigo, I., Johns, V., Lattanzio, A., Schulz, J. and Akkermans, T., 2018: Regional Land Fluxes TCDR within the EUMETSAT Climate Monitoring SAF: Evapotranspiration and Latent and Sensible Heat Fluxes. Poster presented at the EUMETSAT Meteorological Satellite Conference 2018, 17-21 September 2018, Tallinn, Estonia.