Introduction

The European Space Agency is organizing a new series of regular advanced thematic training courses. These trainings - covering initially ocean, land and atmosphere applications - are hosted in European Universities, with the host country rotating among the ESA Member States.

The series was initiated by an advanced Ocean remote sensing training course which took place in Hamburg, Germany, in September 2006.

The second training was devoted to the exploitation of Earth Observation data from ESA and Third Party Mission instruments for land applications, with a focus on applications over Europe. The training course was held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 2 to 7 September 2007. It was hosted by the Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (ISEGI-UNL), with coordination support from the Remote Sensing Unit of the Portuguese Geographic Institute (Instituto Geográfico Português, IGP).

As an advanced training course, it was targeted to the European and Canadian research and development community, in particular post-doc researchers as well as masters and PhD students.

Objectives

The specific objectives of the advanced land training course were to:

1.      Stimulate and support the exploitation of ESA EO and Third Party Mission (TPM) remote sensing data for land applications;

2.      Introduce available tools and methods for the exploitation of ERS, Envisat, TPM and Explorers satellite data;

3.      Train the next generation of European and Canadian Principal Investigators (PIs);

EOPI portal: gate to ESA data

Course Contents

The 2007 land training course addressed both Radar and Optical/Thermal remote sensing and focused on GMES land thematic priorities:

Land resources (forestry, agriculture, land cover and land use);
Disasters (fires, floods, terrain motion);
Water resources (water availability).

It included lectures by leading scientists as well as hands-on computing exercises exposing students to remote sensing applications and illustrating the use of specific software tools for the exploitation of EO data, with a focus on Envisat and ERS data products for land applications (e.g. (A)SAR, MERIS and (A)ATSR).