Daily global plant-greenness and reflectance map (Copernicus)
What it measures. Daily snapshots of how much sunlight the land surface reflects, plus a vegetation greenness index (NDVI) that tracks how healthy and dense plant cover is. Each pixel covers about a kilometer of ground.
How it's made. Built from the SYNERGY instruments aboard ESA Copernicus's Sentinel-3 satellites, processed to Level-2 and designed to continue the long record from the older SPOT VEGETATION sensors.
How & where you'd use it. Helps monitor crop and forest health, drought, and seasonal greening of landscapes, and keeps a consistent decades-long vegetation record going for climate and agriculture studies.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2018-10-04 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
This Collection provides the Sentinel-3 Synergy Level-2 1-Day Surface Reflectance and NDVI products, which are SPOT VEGETATION Continuity Products similar to those obtained from the VEGETATION instrument onboard the SPOT-4 and SPOT-5 satellites.
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["sentinel-3-syn-2-vg1-ntc"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarrayBrowsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC