KB creator:

Peer Reviewer:

Approval date:

Please be aware that this is an experimental catalogue entry which uses an alternative source for the Land cover data designed for fast access long-timeseries for a single point, and it is not recommended for operational use.

The entry may be temporarily disabled or completely deprecated at any point and it does not come with the same level of operational support as the parent entry. Additionally, the formats and structure of the data files are subject to change.

Introduction

This dataset presented here is a post-processed version of the original CDS Land cover dataset on approximately 300m resolution and is stored in Analysis Ready Cloud Optimised (ARCO) format, which has been implemented for retrieving long time-series for a single point in a efficient way.

The dataset contains data from 1992 onwards. The version used to produce the data between 1992 to 2015 is v2.0.7cds and v2.1.1 after 2016.

Methodology

The process to generate this dataset involves:

Fetching Satellite Land Cover data in netCDF format.
Regridding from original tripolar coordinate system to a regular 0.25º longitude and latitude grid.
Applying homogenization conventions, as applicable:
- Ensure latitude, longitude ranges are between [-90, +90], [-180, +180].
Writing to an ARCO Zarr archive (which is similar in structure to netCDF).
The CDS requests the data from the Zarr archive using xarray and writes the data to netCDF or CSV (as requested).

Data organization and access

The ARCO data is stored as Zarr datacubes.

The data is now available from the Climate Data Store (CDS), either interactively through its download web form or programmatically using the CDS API service:

Land cover classification time-series data from 1992 to present derived from satellite observations

Spatial grid

The parameters have longitude and latitude dimensions and a resolution of 300m.

Please be aware when you select a "Location" on the form, the latitude and longitude values are rounded to the closest neighborhood point of the degrees grid. Similarly, selecting an “Area” returns all points within the region defined by the nearest neighborhood corner points to the user-specified S, W, N, and E latitude/longitude values.

Temporal frequency

Temporal frequency of the data is yearly but with one year delay to present.

Data format

In the CDS, there are the options of retrieving the data in netCDF format or CSV format.

Data update frequency

Due to a transition between project phases, there are changes to the timeline of this dataset updates, which are usually on an annual basis with a one year delay: 2023 and 2024 data updates are now expected during 2026. Please watch the forum for future announcements.

Parameters listings

Table 1 below lists the parameters available.

Table 1: Parameters


change_count
current_pixel_state
land_cover_class
observation_count
processed_flag

Known issues

Please refer to the Land cover documentation.

_{This document has been produced in the context of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).}

_{The activities leading to these results have been contracted by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, operator of C3S on behalf of the European Union (Delegation Agreement signed on 11/11/2014 and Contribution Agreement signed on 22/07/2021). All information in this document is provided "as is" and no guarantee or warranty is given that the information is fit for any particular purpose.}

_{The users thereof use the information at their sole risk and liability. For the avoidance of all doubt , the European Commission and the European Centre for Medium - Range Weather Forecasts have no liability in respect of this document, which is merely representing the author's view.}

	Name	Variable name
1	Change count	change_count
2	Current pixel state	current_pixel_state
3	Land cover class	land_cover_class
4	Observation count	observation_count
5	Processed flag	processed_flag