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.

Document - General Reference

The-Changing-Earth-New-Scientific-Challenges-for-ESAs-Living-Planet-Programme.pdf

This article is extracted from ESA Bulletin Nr. 129.

Document - General Reference

The Science and Research Elements of ESA Living Planet Programme

This document presents the plans for the Earth Explorer element of the European Space Agency's 'Living Planet' Programme for Earth Observation.

Document - General Reference

The Nine Candidate Earth Explorer Missions - Topography Mission

This report for assessment addresses the Topography mission when it was selected with other nine Earth Explorer missions as a potential candidate for Phase A study.

Document - General Reference

The Nine Candidate Earth Explorer Missions - Land-Surface Processes and Interactions Mission

This report for assessment addresses the Land-Surface Processes and Interactions mission when it was selected with other nine Earth Explorer missions as a potential candidate for Phase A study.

Document - General Reference

The four Candidate Earth Explorer Core Missions - Land-Surface Processes and Interactions Mission

This report describes the Land-Surface Processes and Interactions Mission, one of the four Candidate Earth Explorers in 1999.

Document - General Reference

The Earth Observation Handbook, 2010 Update - Key Tables

This is the 2010 update of the CEOS Earth Observation Handbook. You can browse the live database at http://database.eohandbook.com/ or download the printable PDF of key tables based on the 2010 database contents for a handy reference.

Document - General Reference

SPECTRA-Surface-Processes-and-Ecosystem-Changes-Through-Response-Analysis.pdf

This report describes the SPECTRA mission, one of the candidate Earth Explorers in the second cycle in 2001.

Document - General Reference

SMOS-ESAs-Water-Mission-Fact-sheet.pdf

This document provided a series of information on the SMOS mission.

Document - General Reference

Sentinel-1-The-Radar-Mission-for-GMES-Land-and-Sea-Services.pdf

This article is extracted from ESA Bulletin Nr. 131.

Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

Sea Ice Thematic Data Product [ALT_TDP_SI]

This is the Sea Ice Thematic Data Product (TDP) V1 resulting from the ESA FDR4ALT project and containing the sea ice related geophysical parameters, along with associated uncertainties: snow depth, radar and sea-ice freeboard, sea ice thickness and concentration. The collection covers data for the ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat missions, and bases on Level 1 data coming from previous reprocessing (ERS REAPER and the Envisat V3.0) but taking into account the improvements made at Level 0/Level 1 in the frame of FDR4ALT (ALT FDR). The Sea Ice TDP provides data from the northern or southern hemisphere in two files corresponding to the Arctic and Antarctic regions respectively for the winter periods only, i.e., October to June for the Arctic, and May to November for the Antarctic. For many aspects, the Sea Ice TDP is very innovative: First time series of sea-ice thickness estimates for ERS Homogeneous calibration, allowing the first Arctic radar freeboard time series from ERS-1 (1991) to CryoSat-2 (2021) Uncertainties estimated along-track with a bottom-up approach based on dominant sources ERS pulse blurring error corrected using literature procedure [Peacock, 2004] The FDR4ALT products are available in NetCDF format. Free standard tools for reading NetCDF data can be used. Information for expert altimetry users is also available in a dedicated NetCDF group within the products. Please consult the FDR4ALT Product User Guide before using the data. The FDR4ALT datasets represent the new reference data for the ERS/Envisat altimetry missions, superseding any previous mission data. Users are strongly encouraged to make use of these datasets for optimal results.

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 - General Reference

Remote-Sensing-and-marine-ecology.pdf

This volume collects the lecture notes of the training course on Marine Remote Sensing and its applications, held on 15-26 June 1998 at ESA ESRIN, Frascati, Italy. The lectures were held in italian: the book is available in italian only.

Document - Technical Note

Radar-Altimeter-Ground-Processing-Requirement.pdf

This document defines the Fast Delivery Ground Processing Algorithm Requirements for the ERS-1 Radar Altimeter. It does not include the basic tasks of decoding the telemetry stream, and assumes that the relevant parameters have been extracted for ingestion into the algorithms presented here.

Document - Technical Note

RA-Characterisation-Data.pdf

This document can be regarded as a first issue of the long-awaited RA Characterisation Database. It contains values for all parameters which have been requested, except for some special cases which will be explained later. It contains many other parameters as well. For example it also contains all the parameters used in the LRDPF (and referred to in ER-RP-DSF-SY-0007) except for the parameters forseen to be updated frequently, such as the barometric pressure field (which will come from ECMWF).

Document - General Reference

Product equivalence for ERS-Envisat AO-Cat-1 users

Document - Proceedings

PolInSAR-2007-Proceedings-of-the-3rd-International-Workshop-on-Science-and-Applications-of-SAR-Polarimetry-and-Polarimetric-Interferometry.pdf

Proceedings of PolInSAR 2007 held in Frascati, Italy on from 22-26 January 2007.

Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

Ocean Waves Thematic Data Product [ALT_TDP_WA]

This is the Ocean Waves Thematic Data Product (TDP) V1 resulting from the ESA FDR4ALT project and containing Significant Wave Height estimates for the ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat missions. Compared to existing datasets, the Ocean Waves TDP demonstrates notable improvements in several aspects: Great improvements for Envisat due to noise reduction from Adaptive retracker and High-Frequency Adjustment (HFA) All variables are given at 5 Hz The FDR4ALT products are available in NetCDF format. Free standard tools for reading NetCDF data can be used. Information for expert altimetry users is also available in a dedicated NetCDF group within the products. Please consult the FDR4ALT Product User Guide before using the data. The FDR4ALT datasets represent the new reference data for the ERS/Envisat altimetry missions, superseding any previous mission data. Users are strongly encouraged to make use of these datasets for optimal results.

Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

Ocean and Coastal Topography Thematic Data Product [ALT_TDP_OC]

This is the Ocean and Coastal Topography Thematic Data Product (TDP) V1 resulting from the ESA FDR4ALT project and containing improved sea surface height anomaly data records both at 1 Hz and 20 Hz resolution to address climate and/or coastal areas studies. The collection covers data for the ERS-1, ERS-2 and Envisat missions. Note that a dedicated processing to coastal zones has been applied for coastal distances below 200 km. Compared to existing datasets, the Ocean and Coastal Topography TDP demonstrates notable improvements in several aspects: Up-to-date orbit and geophysical corrections applied Adaptive retracker for Envisat The FDR4ALT products are available in NetCDF format. Free standard tools for reading NetCDF data can be used. Information for expert altimetry users is also available in a dedicated NetCDF group within the products. Please consult the FDR4ALT Product User Guide before using the data. The FDR4ALT datasets represent the new reference data for the ERS/Envisat altimetry missions, superseding any previous mission data. Users are strongly encouraged to make use of these datasets for optimal results.

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.