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  • News (5)
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  • Documents (5)
  • News - Events and Proceedings

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    Setting the standard for drone-based validation of satellite data

    The ESA-supported Surface Reflectance Intercomparison eXercise for Vegetation (SRIX4Veg) – which began in 2022 – is working to put forward good-practice procedures agreed through a series of workshops and a dedicated UAV campaign.

  • News - Thematic area articles

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    Monitoring water on Earth's surface

    ESA's Earth observation satellites are playing a leading role in furthering our understanding of how Earth's terrestrial hydrosphere is being influenced by humankind.

  • News - Thematic area articles

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    Global understanding of Earth's land surfaces greatly boosted by satellite data

    ESA perform land surface monitoring with a range of instruments onboard satellites acquiring optical and radar data. Collections of data from these missions are freely available for research purposes.

  • Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

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    Landsat 7 ETM+ European and Mediterranean Countries Cloud Free Collection

    This dataset contains the cloud-free products from Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper collection acquired over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East; for each scene only one product is selected, with the minimal cloud coverage. The Landsat 7 ETM+ scenes typically cover 185 x 170 km. A standard full scene is nominally centred on the intersection between a Path and Row (the actual image centre can vary by up to 100 m). The data are system corrected.

  • Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

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    Landsat 5 TM European and Mediterranean Countries Cloud Free Collection

    This dataset contains the cloud-free products from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper collection acquired over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East; for each scene only one product is selected, with the minimal cloud coverage. The acquired Landsat TM scene covers approximately 183 x 172.8 km. A standard full scene is nominally centred on the intersection between a path and row (the actual image centre can vary by up to 100 m). The data are system corrected.

  • News - Thematic area articles

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    Satellite data boost global understanding of land surface

    Understanding our changing land surface is essential in the study of climate change. Satellites are used to monitor changes to the material that covers Earth’s surface, so-called land cover, such as vegetation and water.

  • Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

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    Landsat 8 Collection 2 European Coverage

    This dataset contains the European coverage of Landsat-8 Collection 2 data, both Level-1 and Level-2, acquired since the beginning of the mission. Landsat-8 Collection 2 is the result of a reprocessing effort on the archive and on newly acquired products with significant improvement with respect to Collection 1 on data quality, obtained by means of advancements in data processing and algorithm development. Primarily, this involves a relevant improvement in the absolute geolocation accuracy (now re-baselined to the European Space Agency Copernicus Sentinel-2 Global Reference Image (GRI) but also includes updated digital elevation modelling sources, improved Radiometric Calibration (even correction for the TIRS striping effect), enhanced Quality Assessment Bands, updated and consistent metadata files and usage of Cloud Optimised Georeferenced (COG) Tagged Image File Format. Landsat-8 Level-1 products combine data from the two Landsat instruments, OLI and TIRS. The Level-1 products generated can be either L1TP or L1GT: L1TP - Level-1 Precision Terrain (Corrected) (L1T) products: Radiometrically calibrated and orthorectified using ground control points (GCPs) and digital elevation model (DEM) data to correct for relief displacement. The highest quality Level-1 products suitable for pixel-level time series analysis. GCPs used for L1TP correction are derived from the Global Land Survey 2000 (GLS2000) data set. L1GT - Level-1 Systematic Terrain (Corrected) (L1GT) products: L1GT data products consist of Level-0 product data with systematic radiometric, geometric and terrain corrections applied and resampled for registration to a cartographic projection, referenced to the WGS84, G873, or current version. The dissemination server contains three different classes of Level-1 products Real Time (RT): Newly acquired Landsat-8 OLI/TIRS data are processed upon downlink but use an initial TIRS line-of-sight model parameters; the data are made available in less than 12 hours (4-6 hours typically). Once the data have been reprocessed with the refined TIRS parameters, the products are transitioned to either Tier 1 or Tier 2 and removed from the Real-Time tier (in 14-16 days). Tier 1 (T1): Landsat scenes with the highest available data quality are placed into Tier 1 and are considered suitable for time-series analysis. Tier 1 includes Level-1 Precision and Terrain (L1TP) corrected data that have well-characterized radiometry and are inter-calibrated across the different Landsat instruments. The georegistration of Tier 1 scenes is consistent and within prescribed image-to-image tolerances of ≦ 12-metre radial root mean square error (RMSE). Tier 2 (T2): Landsat scenes not meeting Tier 1 criteria during processing are assigned to Tier 2. Tier 2 scenes adhere to the same radiometric standard as Tier 1 scenes, but do not meet the Tier 1 geometry specification due to less accurate orbital information (specific to older Landsat sensors), significant cloud cover, insufficient ground control, or other factors. This includes Systematic Terrain (L1GT) and Systematic (L1GS) processed data. Landsat-8 Level-2 products are generated from L1GT and L1TP Level-1 products that meet the <76 degrees Solar Zenith Angle constraint and include the required auxiliary data inputs to generate a scientifically viable product. The data are available a couple of days after the Level-1 T1/T2. The Level-2 products generated can be L2SP or L2SR: L2SP - Level-2 Science Products (L2SP) products: include Surface Reflectance (SR), Surface Temperature (ST), ST intermediate bands, an angle coefficients file, and Quality Assessment (QA) Bands. L2SR - Level-2 Surface Reflectance (L2SR) products: include Surface Reflectance (SR), an angle coefficients file, and Quality Assessment (QA) Bands; it is generated if ST could not be generated. Two different categories of Level-1 products are offered: LC with Optical, Thermal and Quality Map images, LO with Optical and Quality Map images (Thermal not available). For the Level-2 data, only LC combined products are generated.

  • Event - Workshop

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    Fringe 1996 Workshop

    The workshop on ERS SAR Interferometry was open to scientists and students working in the field of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) interferometry and its applications.

  • Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

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    Landsat ETM+ ESA archive

    This dataset contains all the Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper high-quality ortho-rectified L1T products (or L1Gt where not enough GCPs are available) over Kiruna, Maspalomas, Matera and Neustrelitz visibility masks. The Landsat-7 ETM+ scenes typically covers 185 x 170 km. A standard full scene is nominally centred on the intersection between a Path and Row (the actual image centre can vary by up to 100 m). Each band requires 50 MB (uncompressed), and Band 8 requires 200 MB (panchromatic band with resolution of 15 m opposed to 30 m). Kiruna, Maspalomas and Matera Landsat-7 ETM density maps

  • Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

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    Landsat TM ESA archive

    This dataset contains all the Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper high-quality ortho-rectified L1T dataset acquired by ESA over the Fucino, Matera, Kiruna and Maspalomas visibility masks, as well as campaign data over Malindi, Bishkek, Chetumal, and Libreville. The acquired Landsat TM scene covers approximately 183 x 172.8 km. A standard full scene is nominally centred on the intersection between a path and row (the actual image centre can vary by up to 100 m). A full image is composed of 6920 pixels x 5760 lines and each band requires 40 MB of storage space (uncompressed) at 30 m spatial resolution in the VIS, NIR and SWIR as well as 120 m in the TIR spectral range. Kiruna Landsat TM GTC density map Maspalomas Landsat TM GTC density map Matera Landsat TM GTC density map

  • News - Success Stories

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    Using Satellite Data to Predict Floods and Droughts

    Scientists are turning to remote sensing to fill the in-situ data gap in hydrological data models in some parts of the world.

  • Campaign

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    FIRMOS

    In preparation of the Earth Explorer 9 FORUM mission, a new facility named FIRMOS (Far-Infrared Radiation Mobile Observation System) has been developed for field applications from both ground-based and airborne platforms to check with real measurements the sounding capability provided by FIR observations.

  • Event - Workshop

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    POLinSAR 2013

    The objectives of the PolInSAR 2013 workshop were to present the latest studies and results of SAR polarimetry and polarimetric interferometry.

  • Data - Announcement of Opportunity (Restrained)

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    Announcement of Opportunity for NoR

    ESA invites submissions for the Network of Resources (NoR) call, which aims to support research, development and pre-commercial users to innovate their working practices, moving from a data download paradigm towards a 'bring the user to the data' paradigm.

  • Data - External Data (Restrained)

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    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.

  • Event - Workshop

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    POLinSAR 2019

    ESA organised POLinSAR 2019, the 9th International Workshop on Science and Applications of SAR Polarimetry and Polarimetric Interferometry.

  • Event - Workshop

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    POLinSAR 2009

    The 2009 workshop focused on theory and methods in the fields of SAR Polarimetry and Polarimetric Interferometry

  • Event - Workshop

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    4th CHRIS PROBA Workshop

    Workshop on the treatment of Compact High Resolution Images Spectrometer (CHRIS) data.

  • Document - Conference Presentation - Poster

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    1_Polarimetric_Soil_Moisture_Retrieval_Vegetated_Soils_in_TERENO.pdf

    Polarimetric Decompositions for Soil Moisture Retrieval from Vegetated Soils in TERENO Observatories T. Jagdhuber [German Aerospace Center - DLR]

  • Document - Conference Presentation - Poster

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    2_Charbonneau_compact_pol.pdf

    RCM Compact Polarimetry Applied to Watershed Study F. J. Charbonneau [Natural Resources Canada]