The aim of this study is to accurately model the GPP for a region in West Africa with a spatial resolution of 250 m, and the differentiation of GPP based on woody and herbaceous vegetation. For this purpose, the Regional Biomass Model (RBM) was applied, which is based on a Light Use Efficiency (LUE) approach. The focus was on the spatial enhancement of the RBM from the original 1000–250 m spatial resolution (RBM+). The adaptation to the 250 m scale included the modification of two main input parameters: (1) the fraction of absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (FPAR) based on the 1000 m MODIS MOD15A2 FPAR product which was downscaled to 250 m using MODIS NDVI time series; (2) the fractional cover of woody and herbaceous vegetation, which was improved by using a multi-scale approach. For validation and regional adjustments of GPP and the input parameters, in situ data from a climate station and eddy covariance measurements were integrated.
The results of this approach show that the input parameters could be improved significantly: downscaling considerably reduces data gaps of the original FPAR product and the improved dataset differed less than 5.0% from the original data for cloud free regions. The RMSE of the fractional vegetation cover varied between 5.1 and 12.7%. Modelled GPP showed a slight overestimation in comparison to eddy covariance measurements. The in situ data was exceeded by 8.8% for 2005 and by 2.0% for 2006. The model results were converted to NPP and also agreed well with previous NPP measurements reported from different studies. Altogether a high accuracy and suitability of the regionally adjusted and downscaled model RBM+ can be concluded. The differentiation between vegetation growth forms allows a separation of long-term and short-term carbon storage based on woody and herbaceous vegetation, respectively.