Generation of a 16 m/10-day fractional vegetation cover product over China based on Chinese GaoFen-1 observations: method and validation

As China has recently launched the GaoFen-1 satellite (GF-1) carrying on the wide-field view (WFV) sensor, it is a challenging task to make full use of its observations to produce the fractional vegetation cover (FVC). In light of this, our study presents a comprehensive algorithm to generate a 16 m/10-day FVC product by considering the vegetation types characteristics. For forests, considering the foliage clumping effect, FVC was estimated from the gap probability theory using GF-1 leaf area index (LAI) and clumping index (CI) as a priori knowledge; for non-forests, FVC was estimated from the dimidiate pixel model using GF-1 normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The performance of GF-1 FVC from 2018 to 2020 was evaluated using FVC ground measurements obtained from 7 sites for crops, grasslands, and forests in China. The direct validation indicated that the performance of the FVC product was satisfactory, as evidenced by R 2 = 0.55, RMSE = 0.15 and BIAS = 0.01 for all vegetation types. Furthermore, the GF-1 FVC exhibited better performance compared to the GEOV3 FVC at a spatial resolution of 300 meters. Moreover, the 10-day temporal interval of GF-1 FVC product successfully facilitated the extraction of regional phenological information at a spatial resolution of 16 meters.