- All Categories (565)
- Data (5)
- News (6)
- Missions (1)
- Events (11)
- Tools (2)
- Activities (2)
- Campaigns (4)
- Documents (534)
News - General News
ESA's improved Earth system data records: what is in store for the future?
Fundamental Data Records (FDRs) are instrumental in advancing our understanding of Earth systems and for addressing societal challenges effectively. These long-term records contain uncertainty-quantified, calibrated and geo-located multi-instrument/multi-platform satellite sensor data spanning several decades to support climate-related applications.
News - Success Stories
Trailblazing ERS-2 mission enables climate change applications
As ESA’s ERS-2 satellite approaches Earth’s atmosphere for reentry, it’s time to reflect on the mission’s great achievements in powering climate-related applications.
Event - Training
EO Summer School 7
ESA's series of summer schools, on Monitoring of the Earth System, aims to promote the exploitation of Earth observation data.
Event - Training
EO Summer School 6
ESA's series of summer schools, on Monitoring of the Earth System, aims to promote the exploitation of Earth observation data.
Event - Training
EO Summer School 5
ESA's series of summer schools, on Monitoring of the Earth System, aims to promote the exploitation of Earth observation data.
Event - Training
EO Summer School 4
ESA's series of summer schools, on Monitoring of the Earth System, aims to promote the exploitation of Earth observation data.
Event - Conference
Living Planet Symposium 2022
Learn about the 2022 edition of ESA's Living Planet Symposium.
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.
News - Spotlight on EO community
Interviewing Mirko Albani
ESA’s Heritage Space Programme Manager describes the goals of the programme, some of the challenges involved in preserving and improving 40 years of historical Earth observation data, and his passion for curating this long-term archive.
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.
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.
Document - Publication - Paper
Calibration strategy for ERS scatterometer data reprocessing.pdf
Paper included in the Proceedings of SPIE Remote Sensing of the Ocean and Sea Ice 2005 - vol.5977- Brugge (Belgium): Calibration strategy for ERS scatterometer data reprocessing. WS Cal/Val.
Data - Announcement of Opportunity (Restrained)
Announcement of Opportunity for G-POD
ESA is offering all scientists the possibility to perform bulk processing and/or validation of their own algorithms exploiting the large ESA Earth-observation archive.
Data - Fast Registration with immediate access (Open)
ERS-2 SCATTEROMETER Surface Soil Moisture Time Series and Orbit product in High and Nominal Resolution [SSM.H/N.TS - SSM.H/N]
Surface soil moisture records are derived from the backscatter coefficient measured by the Scatterometer on-board the European Remote Sensing satellite (ERS-2) using the Technische Universität (TU) Wien soil moisture retrieval algorithm called WARP (WAter Retrieval Package). In the WARP algorithm, the relative surface soil moisture estimates, given in degree of saturation Sd, range between 0% and 100% are derived by scaling the normalized backscatter between the lowest/highest backscatter values corresponding to the driest/wettest soil conditions. Surface Soil Moisture - Time Series product: The products generated are the surface soil moisture time series, where for each grid point defined in a DGG (Discrete Global Grid) is stored the time series of soil moisture and its noise, the surface state flag, the geolocation and the satellite parameters. The spatial resolution of the products is about 25 km x 25 km (high resolution) or 50 km x 50 km (nominal resolution) geo-referenced on the WARP grid. The location of the points can be viewed interactively with the tool DGG Point Locator. Surface Soil Moisture - Orbit product: In addition to WARP, a second software package, referred to as WARP orbit, was developed in response to the strong demand of soil moisture estimates in satellite orbit geometry. The Level 2 soil moisture orbit product contains a series of Level 1 data information, such as the backscatter, the incidence angle and the azimuth angle for each triplet together with the surface soil moisture and its noise, normalized backscatter at 40° incidence angle, parameters useful for soil moisture, the geolocation and the satellite parameters. The soil moisture orbit product is available in two spatial resolutions with different spatial sampling distances: Spatial sampling on a regular 12.5 km grid in orbit geometry with a spatial resolution of about 25 km x 25 km (High resolution) Spatial sampling on a regular 25 km grid in orbit geometry with a spatial resolution of about 50 km x 50 km (Nominal resolution). The spatial resolution is defined by the Hamming window function, which is used for re-sample of raw backscatter measurements to the orbit grid in the Level-1 ground processor. Please consult the Product Quality Readme file before using the ERS-2 Surface Soil Moisture data.
Data - External Data (Restrained)
ADAM Surface Reflectance Database v4.0
ADAM enables generating typical monthly variations of the global Earth surface reflectance at 0.1° spatial resolution (Plate Carree projection) and over the spectral range 240-4000 nm. The ADAM product is made of gridded monthly mean climatologies over land and ocean surfaces, and of a companion API toolkit that enables the calculation of hyperspectral (at 1 nm resolution over the whole 240-4000 nm spectral range) and multidirectional reflectances (i.e. in any illumination/viewing geometry) depending on user choices. The ADAM climatologies that feed the ADAM calculation tools are: For ocean: Monthly chlorophyll concentration derived from SeaWiFS-OrbView-2 (1999-2009); it is used to compute the water column reflectance (which shows large spectral variations in the visible, but is insignificant in the near and mid infrared). Monthly wind speed derived from SeaWinds-QuikSCAT-(1999-2009); it is used to calculate the ocean glint reflectance. For land: Monthly normalized surface reflectances in the 7 MODIS narrow spectral bands derived from FondsdeSol processing chain of MOD09A1 products (derived from Aqua and Terra observations), on which relies the modelling of the hyperspectral/multidirectional surface (soil/vegetation/snow) reflectance. Uncertainty variance-covariance matrix for the 7 spectral bands associated to the normalized surface reflectance. For sea-ice: Sea ice pixels (masked in the original MOD09A1 products) have been accounted for by a gap-filling approach relying on the spatial-temporal distribution of sea ice coverage provided by the CryoClim climatology for year 2005.
