The PROBA-V Mission Exploitation Platform (MEP), as an ESA pathfinder project, has the ambition to complement the PROBA-V user segment by building an operational Exploitation Platform on these data, correlative data and derived products, addressing the wider vegetation user community with the final aim to ease and foster the use of PROBA-V data.

A rich set of tools will gradually be deployed and users can develop-debug-deploy their own applications on a scalable platform with access to the full data archive from PROBA-V, SPOT-VEGETATION and a growing set of derived products from different users. Also data which support the users in doing their research (Cal/Val, meteo data, etc.) will be provided.

The reasons for deploying a MEP dedicated to the PROBA-V mission are numerous:

• The data and specifically the time series of daily / ten-daily data from 1998 (starting with SPOT-VEGETATION) till present is too big to be downloaded to and processed on the user premises, at least for the majority of the users.
• On top of the EO-data mentioned before, the platform will co-locate as well complementary data in a way that it is easy accessible. Furthermore tools/libraries/applications which can be used by the large community will be provided. This includes as well the data needed for Cal/Val activities.
• The platform can stimulate collaboration between the users, as we colocate services from various users and tools to support the publishing on these services, as well as providing feedback. A further focus on documentation, knowledge sharing and user support complements this.
• The platform goes beyond offering standard products by offering in a first place applications to visualize and analyse large time series of data and pre-defined on-demand processing services which deliver user-tailored products. In a next step we will deploy gradually a Virtual Research Environment, being a platform which allows users to develop – debug – test an application on the platform infrastructure with access to the complete data archive. Validated applications from 3rd-parties can then be offered as an operational on-demand processing services to the large user community on the same platform.