The BACI System State Vector datasets cover large regional sites in Europe, West, Eastern and Southern Africa in addition to smaller fast track sites in Denmark, Wytham Forest, Kruger National Park, Hainich, Viterbo, Romania, Slovenia, Ethiopia and Southern/Central/Northern Somalia.

The BACI datasets address one of main complications in combining different Earth Observation (EO) data streams is a requirement of common time and space resolution. These data are gap free time series, of EO data across optical (reflectance, albedo), passive microwave (LST) and active microwave (backscatter) domains. This collection contains optimally smoothed and filtered time series of reflectance, albedo and backscatter datasets, starting in 2000 and running to the present, as the core SSV output.

Crucially, the SSV data is provided with consistent uncertainties, which is key for use in downstream quantitative modelling and change detection applications, particularly to help attribute and explain detected change. Changes in the Earth’s surface can have very different properties and so can influence very different domains of the electromagnetic spectrum. As a result these datasets are particularly useful for trying to detect changes in ecosystem structure and function, a potentially vital application for satellite monitoring of the Earth system.