The director of Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE) has been sacked in the midst of a controversy over its satellite data showing a rise in Amazon deforestation, which the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has called “lies”.

Ricardo Galvão, who had defended the institute and criticised Bolsonaro’s attack, was dismissed on Friday after a meeting with the science and technology minister, Marcos Pontes.

“The way I expressed myself in relation to the president has caused an unsustainable embarrassment,” Galvão said on Friday morning, according to the Folha de S Paulo newspaper site.

“Sacking the director of INPE is just an act of vengeance against someone who showed the truth,” said Greenpeace Brasil’s public policy coordinator, Márcio Astrini, in a statement.

Created in 2004, the Deter satellite system makes monthly and daily data publicly available on a regularly updated government website. Its data for recent months showed an alarming rise in deforestation in recent months: it soared 88% in June compared with a year earlier. The first half of July was 68% up on the whole of July 2018.

Bolsonaro and his ministers have called its release irresponsible and an attempt to stain Brazil’s image abroad. Last month he called INPE numbers “lies” and implied that Galvão was in “the service” of a foreign non-profit group. The next day Galvão said the president behaved “like he is in a bar” and defended the institute’s data.

The most accurate data on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is collected by the Prodes satellite system and released annually. The Deter satellite system has a lower resolution and is primarily used for deforestation alerts, said Tasso Azevedo, a former head of Brazil’s forest service. But over the last 12 years, whenever annual Deter data showed deforestation increasing, Prodes confirmed the trend and calculated an even higher rate. Publicly available Prodes data goes back to 1988.

Azevedo is the coordinator of MapBiomas, an initiative from NGOs, universities and technology companies that monitors changes in land use. He said that from January to July, accumulated Deter numbers showed a 62% increase in deforestation compared with the same period last year, and that three other international satellite monitoring systems had also shown rising deforestation. “All have different methodology, so the data is different, but all of them point to a rise in deforestation,” he said.

On Thursday, Bolsonaro and the environment minister, Ricardo Salles, criticised the release of data as irresponsible and sensationalist. “The numbers were thrashed out, it seems to me, with the aim of striking at the name of Brazil and the government,” Bolsonaro said.

In a presentation, Salles said his team had found hundreds of areas of deforestation included in the July figures from previous months or years. He did not explain the methodology used. INPE defended its numbers in a statement and said it had not been given prior access to Salles’s study.

The government fears that the alarming data could prejudice an important trade deal between the South American trade bloc, Mercosur, and the EU. Environmentalists said the damage had already been done.

“Brazil’s image is already hopelessly compromised by this crusade against the facts,” said Carlos Rittl, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory.