Frequently Asked Questions - Proba

The Proba-V sensor is a European follow-on to the SPOT VGT mission.  It acquires global images of the earth’s land surface and vegetation growth every two days (five days at 100 m resolution).  Data are acquired at four wavelengths; blue, red, NIR, at 100 m resolution and SWIR at 200 m resolution.  View the Proba-V mission page for more detailed information.

Several products are available and are distributed at 100 m, 300 m and 1 km spatial resolutions.  The 1 km products are freely available to all users as soon as they are compiled.  The 100 m and 300 m products are freely available one month after they are compiled.

You can view a nice collection of images at the Proba-V gallery.  The images are thematically organized and show the capabilities of these data.

Proba-V products are organized into Collections by spatial resolution, number of days for a composite, and processing level.  The data are distributed in 10° x 10° tiles in the HD5 format. 

Collections with an S1 designation are composite images made up from the best pixels for that particular day.  S10 collections are composite images made up from the best pixels over a 10 day period.  The S5 collections are 5-day composites of the 100 m data only.

Collections are further subdivided by processing level.  TOA represents Top Of Atmosphere reflectance data.  The TOC collections are made from the TOA collection with atmospheric corrections applied to the data.  These collections include the VNIR (Blue, Red, NIR) bands and SWIR and NDVI layers.  There is also a 10-day composite with just the NDVI layer.  For example, the collection S1 TOC - 300 m contains one-day composite data that have been atmospherically corrected and contains five bands of data at 300 m spatial resolution.

These data can be downloaded ESA VITO Product Distribution Portal.  You must register as a user (free) to download data.  Click on the Collection to bring up the product search page.  Once you are familiar with the tile designations you can more directly access data via the Fast HTTP Access link.

ENVI version 5.2 software can open the S1 and S10 collection HD5 files directly.  When you open a multispectral HD5 file ENVI will create an RGB layer displaying the NIR, Red, and Blue layers respectively.  Data are automatically scaled to reflectance values.  The SWIR band and NDVI band are placed in the Data Manager as separate files and can be displayed from there.

At this time ENVI cannot open the S5 100 m collections in HD5 format.  When you download these data you should select the TIFF option.  You must then divide the data by 2000.0 to convert the data into reflectance values.