As part of the Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions (SEOM) programme element, the European Space Agency (ESA) organised a series of advanced thematic training courses devoted to training the next generation of Earth Observation (EO) scientists to use data from ESA and operational EO Missions for science and applications development.
The 3rd Advanced Training Course on Ocean Remote Sensing was held in Cork, Ireland, from 23 to 27 September 2013.
The course provided a substantial and balanced introduction to the basic theory and applications related to ocean remote sensing. It was organised around the following main components:
- Theoretical fundamentals of Optical, Thermal and SAR Ocean remote sensing, focusing on use of ESA and Third Party Mission data and products
- Practicals using existing software tools (BEAM, BRAT, SARTool, Bilko) and complementary datasets from ESA for the interpretation of signatures from EO data and their transformation into geo-physical products
- EO data processing and product demonstration for practical monitoring applications in open oceans and coastal zones
The training course included formal lectures by leading scientists as well as hands-on practical exercises allowing students to work with SAR, Optical/Thermal and Radar Altimeter data.
The team of lecturers was composed of Principal Investigators and Professors from leading universities and research institutions.
Objectives
The advanced ocean training course aimed to:
- Training the next generation of European and Canadian Principal Investigators (PIs)
- Teaching and demonstrating theoretical principles, processing algorithms, data products and their use in applications
- Introducing tools and methods for the exploitation of EO satellite data
- Stimulating and supporting the exploitation of EO remote sensing data in ocean applications
- Preparation for the scientific utilisation of data from the Copernicus Sentinel satellite series