Revisiting land cover observations to address the needs of the climate modelling community

Abstract

Abstract. One of the relevant processes driven by political discussion under the United Framework Convention on Climate Change is the monitoring of Essential Climate Variables. Land Cover is one of those variables and efforts are therefore to be made to develop land cover observation approaches which meet the climate modelling community expectations. This paper aims at contributing to this necessity. First, consultation mechanisms were established with the climate modelling community to identify its specific requirements in terms of satellite-based global land cover products. This assessment highlighted specific needs in terms of land cover characterization and products accuracy, stability and consistency that are currently not met. Based on this outcome, the paper calls into question the current land cover representation and for revisiting global land cover mapping approaches. Increasing the flexibility of current classification systems and making the mapping techniques less sensitive to the period of observation are proposed as two key aspects to enhance the usability of global land cover dataset.