Generating a series of land covers by assimilating the existing land cover maps

Land cover (LC), which describes the physical material of land surface, is an important parameter in earth system science. With more and more LC data available, this research aims to establish a data assimilation framework for integrating continuous LC time series based on the existing LC products. The framework is designed by borrowing the basic concept from data assimilation to find out the optimal LC time series based on existing observations. According to the observing system simulation experiments, the assimilation framework showed a good performance against noises and uncertainties. Moreover, after validation with the existing LC reference data, the averaged accuracy of the LC data produced using the assimilation framework was 73.7%, which is a great improvement compared to the existing LC maps considering the temporal continuity. This LC map assimilation framework would be useful for assessing the global LC changes and related researches.