News - Thematic area articles

Cloud-free collections key for land monitoring

Satellite imagery is a crucially important tool for monitoring the land, but cloud cover can often block parts of Earth’s surface from view, limiting subsequent analyses.

News - Success Stories

Commercial and international data for fire monitoring

As climate change sparks a surge in the frequency and intensity of wildfires, satellite data disseminated through ESA’s Third Party Missions (TPM) programme are helping scientists to track and investigate these potentially damaging natural events.

Event - Training

EO Summer School 3

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 - Infographics

An overview of ESA's Third Party Missions programme

ESA’s Third Party Missions programme consists of almost 50 satellite missions, which are owned by organisations around the world. ESA has agreements with these organisations to acquire, process, and distribute data from their missions

News - Data Release news

GOME TCWV Climate product available online

GOME Total Column Water Vapour (TCWV) Climate product developed within the ESA GOME-Evolution project is now accessible from the ESA data archives together with the ERS-2 GOME data.

Data - Project Proposal (Restrained)

SPOT-6 to 7 full archive and tasking

The SPOT 6 and 7 satellites ensure data continuity with the no longer operational SPOT 5 satellite and provide an archive of very high resolution optical acquisition as well as the possibility to task the satellites for new acquisitions. Following the completion of the SPOT 7 mission in March 2023, new acquisition tasking is only available for the SPOT 6 satellite. The ortho-products are automatically generated by the SPOT 6 and 7 ground segment, based on SRTM database or Reference3D when available. The projection available for SPOT 6 and 7 ortho-products is UTM, datum WGS84. Bands combinations: Pansharpened: colour image at 1.5 m resolution Bundle: 1.5 m panchromatic image and 6 m multispectral image. Geometric processing levels: Primary: The Primary product is the processing level closest to the natural image acquired by the sensor. This product restores perfect collection conditions: the sensor is placed in rectilinear geometry, and the image is clear of all radiometric distortion. Standard Ortho: The Ortho product is a georeferenced image in Earth geometry, corrected from acquisition and terrain off-nadir effects. Tailored ortho: Aside from the Standard Ortho product, when different specifications are needed, a custom orthorectification, with a more precise 3D model provided by the client or acquired for the purpose, can be provided on demand. As per ESA policy, very high-resolution imagery of conflict areas cannot be provided.

Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)

AVHRR Level-1B Local Area Coverage Imagery

This collection is composed of AVHRR L1B products (1.1 km) reprocessed from the NOAA POES and Metop AVHRR sensors data acquired at the University of Dundee and University of Bern ground stations and from the ESA and University of Bern data historical archive. The product format is the NOAA AVHRR Level 1B that combines the AVHRR data from the HRPT stream with ancillary information like Earth location and calibration data which can be applied by the user. Other appended parameters are time codes, quality indicators, solar and satellite angles and telemetry. Two data collections cover Europe and the neighbouring regions in the period of 1 January 1981 to 31 December 2020 and the acquired data in the context of the 1-KM project in the ‘90s. During the early 1990’s various groups, including the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) Science Team and ESA concluded that a global land 1 KM AVHRR data set would have been crucial to study and develop algorithms for several land products for the Earth Observing System. USGS, NOAA, ESA and other non-U.S. AVHRR receiving stations endorsed the initiative to collect a global land 1-km multi-temporal AVHRR data set over all land surfaces using NOAA's TIROS "afternoon" polar-orbiting satellite. On 1 April 1992, the project officially began up to the end of 1999 with the utilisation of 23 stations worldwide plus the NOAA local area coverage (LAC) on-board recorders. The global land 1-km AVHRR dataset is composed of 5 channels, raw AVHRR dataset at 1.1 km resolution from the NOAA-11 and NOAA-14 satellites covering land surfaces, inland water and coastal areas. Global Land 1 km AVHRR Data Set Project HRPT Ground Station Network (as of 1 April 1992) and Acquisition Areas for LAC Recorded Data Spatial coverage: Check the spatial coverage of the collection on a map available on the Third Party Missions Dissemination Service: AVHRR L1B 1.1 KM AVHRR L1B LAC Out-of-Europe.

Document - Product Handbook

AVHRR-Handbook.pdf

The AVHRR user handbook provides details about the content of the consolidated and harmonised data set archived at ESA facilities.

News - Success Stories

Forty years of heritage data highlight warming European lakes

In the last decade, climate change has taken centre stage in both the public and scientific arenas, as increasingly extreme weather and human impact on the environment have become more apparent.

Event - Workshop

CEOS-WGCV ACIX II CMIX Atmospheric Correction Inter-comparison Exercise Cloud Masking Inter-comparison Exercise 2nd workshop

The CEOS-WGCV ACIX II 2nd workshop took place at Esrin, Rome in Italy from 3 December - 5 December 2019.

News - Success Stories

Mission continuity

Long-term availability of Earth observation data from a given instrument is crucial to many data users and their research—but just how does it work?

Data - Fast Registration with approval (Restrained)

SPOT 6 and 7 ESA archive

The SPOT 6 and 7 ESA archive is a dataset of SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 products that ESA collected over the years. The dataset regularly grows as ESA collects new SPOT 6 and 7 products. SPOT 6 and 7 Primary and Ortho products can be available in the following modes: Panchromatic image at 1.5m resolution Pansharpened colour image at 1.5m resolution Multispectral image in 4 spectral bands at 6m resolution Bundle (1.5m panchromatic image + 6m multispectral image) Spatial coverage: Check the spatial coverage of the collection on a map available on the Third Party Missions Dissemination Service. As per ESA policy, very high-resolution imagery of conflict areas cannot be provided.

Data - Campaigns (Open)

BACCHUS-DOC

The BACCHUS-DOC Radar and Optical Campaign was an area mapping project of vineyards near Frascati (Italy). ESA required high resolution geo-referenced airborne SAR data of different wavelength and polarisation (preferably polarimetric).

Campaign

BACCHUS-DOC

The BACCHUS-DOC Radar and Optical Campaign was an area mapping project of vineyards near Frascati (Italy). ESA required high resolution geo-referenced airborne SAR data of different wavelength and polarisation (preferably polarimetric).

Tools - Processing

Atmospheric Toolbox

The Atmospheric Toolbox (previously known as BEAT) is a collection of executable tools and API, developed to facilitate the utilisation, viewing and processing of e.g. GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY and GOME data.

Mission - Heritage Missions

SPOT

The SPOT (from French "Satellite pour l'Observation de la Terre") series of missions has been supplying high-resolution, wide-area optical imagery since 1986.

Document - Proceedings

1st EPS-MetOp RAO Workshop

Event - Conference

IGARSS 2019

World-class scientists, engineers and educators in geoscience and remote sensing gathered in Yokohama, Japan, for the 39th annual IGARSS symposium.

Event - Workshop

IDEAS+ Cal/Val Workshop 7

The 7th IDEAS+ Cal/Val Workshop took place on 4 and 5 June 2019 and it was hosted at the Wageningen University and Research (WUR) in The Netherlands.