Start-of-season Date 2017-present (raster 10 m), Europe, yearly, Sept. 2021

The Start-of-Season Date (SOSD), one of the Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (VPP) parameters, is a product of the pan-European High Resolution Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (HR-VPP) component of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS). The Start-of-Season Date (SOSD) marks the date when the vegetation growing season starts in the time profile of the Plant Phenology Index (PPI). The start-of-season occurs, by definition, when the PPI value reaches 25% of the season amplitude during the green-up period. The Plant Phenology Index (PPI) is a physically based vegetation index, developed for improving the monitoring of the vegetation growth cycle. The PPI index values, with 5-day satellite revisit cycle, are first used in a function fitting to derive the PPI Seasonal Trajectories, which is a filtered time series with regular 10-day time step. From these Seasonal Trajectories, a suite of 13 Vegetation Phenology and Productivity (VPP) parameters are then computed and provided, for up to two seasons each year. The Start-of-Season Date is one of the 13 parameters. A complementary quality indicator (QFLAG) provides a confidence level, that is described in table 4 of the same manual. The SOSD dataset is made available as raster files with 10 x 10m resolution, in UTM/WGS84 projection corresponding to the Sentinel-2 tiling grid, for those tiles that cover the EEA38 countries and the United Kingdom and for two seasons in each year from 2017 onwards. It is updated in the first quarter of each year.