Document - Newsletter

Earth Online Newsletter - 08 March 2024

This issue of the Earth Online Newsletter covers a selection of the latest news and events from ESA.

News - Data Release news

FDR4ALT - ESA unveils new cutting-edge ERS/Envisat Altimeter and Microwave Radiometer Datasets

The European Space Agency (ESA) has developed a comprehensive suite of innovative Earth system data records as part of the Fundamental Data Records for Altimetry project - FDR4ALT.

News - Thematic area articles

Transforming space data into climate action

ESA’s Earth observation activities are playing a key role in the revitalised global drive to combat climate change.

Activity - Projects

Dragon 2 Cooperation Programme

The Dragon 2 Programme focussed on the exploitation of ESA, ESA's Third Party Missions and Chinese Earth observation data for science and applications development in land, ocean and atmospheric applications.

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

ALOS AVNIR-2 L1C

This collection provides access to the ALOS-1 AVNIR-2 (Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2) L1C data acquired by ESA stations in the ADEN zone plus some worldwide data requested by European scientists. The ADEN zone was the area belonging to the European Data node and covered both the European and African continents, a large part of Greenland and the Middle East. The full mission archive is included in this collection, though with gaps in spatial coverage Time window: from 2006-04-28 to 2011-04-20 Orbits: from 1375 to 27898 Path (corresponds to JAXA track number): from 1 to 670 Row (corresponds to JAXA scene centre frame number): from 370 to 5230. One single Level 1C product type is offered for the OBS instrument mode: AV2_OBS_1C. The Level 1C product is a multispectral image (three bands in VIS and one in NIR) in GEOTIFF format with 10 m resolution.

News - Data Release news

New reprocessing of datasets celebrates 30 years of ERS

The ERS programme celebrated its 30th anniversary on 17 July. Today, we are still exploiting ERS data and experts continue to work on improving the altimeter, radiometer and SAR data the programme acquired.

News - Success Stories

ERS Heritage Data allow for 30 years of science

At their time of launch thirty years ago, the two ERS satellites were the most sophisticated Earth observation spacecraft ever developed and launched by Europe.

News - Infographics

ERS - ESA’s first Earth observation satellites

To mark the 30th anniversary of ERS, we've released a new infographic summarising the mission.

Tools - Apps

Heritage Missions app for iOS

Download the Heritage Missions application to discover what the missions were about, how it worked and what the elements of the space and ground segment that make these missions unique.

Tools - Apps

Heritage Missions app for Android

Download the Heritage Missions application to discover what the missions were about, how it worked and what the elements of the space and ground segment that make these missions unique.

News - Data Release news

ALOS PALSAR WB1 Collection now available online

Area Observation Mode (Burst Mode 1) collection, which will complete the existing ALOS PALSAR data offer.

Data - Data Description

TropForest - ALOS, GEOSAT-1 & KOMPSAT-2 optical coverages over tropical forests

The objective of the ESA TropForest project was to create a harmonised geo-database of ready-to-use satellite imagery to support 2010 global forest assessment performed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Assessments for year 2010 were essential for building realistic deforestation benchmark rates at global to regional levels. To reach this objective, the project aimed to create a harmonised ortho-rectified/pre-processed imagery geo-database based on satellite data acquisitions (ALOS AVNIR-2, GEOSAT-1 SLIM6, KOMPSAT-2 MSC) performed during year 2009 and 2010, for the Tropical Latin America (excluding Mexico) and for the Tropical South and Southeast Asia (excluding China), resulting in 1971 sites located at 1° x 1° geographical lat/long intersections. The project finally delivered 1866 sites (94.7% of target) due to cloud coverages too high for missing sites. Spatial coverage: Check the spatial coverage of the collection on a map available on the Third Party Missions Dissemination Service.

Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

ALOS African Coverage ESA archive

ALOS Africa is a dataset of the best available (cloud minimal, below 10%) African coverage acquired by AVNIR-2 in OBS mode and PRISM in OB1 mode (all Backward, Nadir and Forward views, in separated products), two different collections one for each instrument. The processing level for both AVNIR-2 and PRISM products is L1B. This dataset is a subset of the main ALOS AVNIR-2 and ALOS PRISM ESA collections. ALOS AVNIR-2: https://doi.org/10.5270/AL1-d9cfa6d ALOS PRISM: https://doi.org/10.5270/AL1-5e400fd.

Mission - Heritage Missions

ERS

The ERS programme was composed of two missions, ERS-1 and ERS-2, which together observed the Earth for 20 years, from 1991 to 2011.

Activity - Quality

SCIRoCCo

The SCIRoCCo project is an interdisciplinary cooperation of scatterometry experts aimed at promoting the continuing exploitation of ESA's unique 20 years' worth of ERS Scatterometer data.

Document - Proceedings

2004 Envisat and ERS Symposium

The 2004 Envisat and ERS Symposium was held in Salzburg - Austria from 6 to 10 September 2004. The 2004 Envisat and ERS Symposium provided a forum for investigators to present results of ongoing research project activities and assess the development of applications and services.

Document - Proceedings

ERS-Envisat Symposium

Event - Training

Advanced Training Course in Land Remote Sensing 2012

The 2012 advanced training course focused on land remote sensing theory and applications.

Event - Training

3rd Advanced Training Course on Land Remote Sensing 2011

This 2011 advanced ESA training course focused on land remote sensing theory and applications.

Event - Conference

ALOS 2008 Symposium

The 2008 Joint PI Symposium of the ALOS Data Nodesa was a forum to exchange views on technical and scientific issues on the data exploitation.