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Commercial satellites and temperature extremes
14 Aug 2025
Commercial satellites included in ESA's Third Party Missions (TPM) programme provide Earth observation data on climate-induced hazards, which are freely available to remote sensing users for research purposes. The programme also disseminates data from missions owned or operated by institutional partner organisations.
This diverse portfolio supports the development of robust crisis response capabilities for extreme temperatures and other climate-related threats, in an era marked by escalating environmental challenges, natural and human-made disasters, and growing security risks.
Discover more about how these data play a role:
Commercial missions in the TPM programme are able to monitor and mitigate examples of temperature-related threats such as:
- Monitoring wildfires with multispectral imagery or radar data. Future missions will aim to provide advanced warning of wildfires using thermal infrared constellations.
- Tracking urban heat islands using thermal infrared data
- Monitoring crop yield, plant stress, and water scarcity with optical imagery, and tracking land surface temperature to help irrigation