- All Categories (205)
- Data (5)
- News (11)
- Missions (3)
- Events (8)
- Tools (2)
- Activities (5)
- Campaigns (1)
- Documents (170)
News - Thematic area articles
Space data support Earth’s ecosystems
ESA’s Earth observation (EO) missions are making a critical contribution to monitoring transformations in our planet’s ecosystems, helping track changes in the vegetation, soil, and ocean that affect these systems.
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.
News - Infographics
Focusing on Envisat MERIS Full Resolution Level-2 data
ESA's Envisat mission continued and expanded upon the legacy of its predecessors, the ERS (European Remote Sensing) satellites. Operating between 2002 and 2012, the satellite's 10 instruments acquired a decade of data for many applications.
News - Thematic area articles
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.
News - Data Release news
Full European Landsat data collection now available under the same catalogue
The Full European Landsat data collection, from Landsat-1 to Landsat-8, is now available under the same catalogue
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.
News - Events and Proceedings
Data preservation takes centre stage at Living Planet Symposium
Against the backdrop of the famed Rhine River, world-class scientists and Earth observation data-users are gathered this week in the historical city of Bonn, at the Living Planet Symposium (LPS).
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.
News - Success Stories
How Envisat helped to shape global understanding of Earth’s systems
Twenty years have passed since a ground-breaking European spacecraft designed to deliver unprecedented insight into the planet’s changing environment was lofted into orbit.
News - Data Release news
New Landsat-8 Collection-2 Level 1 and Level 2 data now available
Within ESA’s Landsat offering, access to the European coverage of Landsat-8 Collection-2 Level 1 and Level 2 data is now available.
Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)
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.
News - Data Release news
New Landsat-8 Collection-2 Level 1 and Level 2 data available from January
From the beginning of 2022, ESA will start the distribution of the European coverage of Landsat-8 Collection-2 Level 1 and Level 2 products.
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.
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 - Infographics
Envisat - ESA's versatile Earth observation satellite
Learn more about ESA's Envisat mission - the largest Earth observation satellite ever built - in a new infographic.
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 - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)
Envisat MERIS Full Resolution - Level 1 [MER_FRS_1P/ME_1_FRG]
The MERIS Level 1 Full Resolution (FR) product contains the Top of Atmosphere (TOA) upwelling spectral radiance measurements. The in-band reference irradiances for the 15 MERIS bands are computed by averaging the in-band solar irradiance of each pixel. The in-band solar irradiance of each pixel is computed by integrating the reference solar spectrum with the band-pass of each pixel. The MERIS FR Level 1 product has Sentinel 3-like format starting from the 4th reprocessing data released to users in July 2020. Each measurement and annotation data file is in NetCDF 4. The Level 1 product is composed of 22 data files: 15 files containing radiances at each band (one band per file), accompanied by the associated error estimates, and 7 annotation data files. The 15 sun spectral flux values provided in the instrument data file of the Level 1 products are the in-band reference irradiances adjusted for the Earth-sun distance at the time of measurement. The band-pass of each pixel is derived from on-ground and in-flight characterisation via an instrument model. The values "Band wavelength" and "Bandwidth" provided in the Manifest file of the Level 1b products are the averaged band-pass of each pixel over the instrument field of view. Auxiliary data are also listed in the Manifest file associated to each product. The Level 1 FR product covers the complete instrument swath. The product duration is not fixed and it can span up to the time interval of the input Level 0 (for a maximum of 20 minutes). Thus the estimated size of the Level 1 FR is dependent on the start/stop time of the acquired segment. During the Envisat mission, acquisition of MERIS Full Resolution data was subject to dedicated planning based on on-demand ordering and coverage of specific areas according to operational recommendations and considerations. See yearly and global density maps to get a better overview of the MERIS FR coverage.
Data - EO Sign In Authentication (Open)
Envisat MERIS Full Resolution - Level 2 [MER_FRS_2P/ME_2_FRG]
MERIS FR Level 2 is a Full-Resolution Geophysical product for Ocean, Land and Atmosphere. Each MERIS Level 2 geophysical product is derived from a MERIS Level 1 product and auxiliary parameter files specific to the MERIS Level 2 processing. The MERIS FR Level 2 product has Sentinel 3-like format starting from the 4th reprocessing data released to users in July 2020. The data package is composed of NetCDF 4 files containing instrumental and scientific measurements, and a Manifest file which contains metadata information related to the description of the product. A Level 2 product is composed of 64 measurement files containing: 13 files containing Water-leaving reflectance, 13 files containing Land surface reflectance and 13 files containing the TOA reflectance (for all bands except those dedicated to measurement of atmospheric gas - M11 and M15), and several files containing additional measurements on Ocean, Land and Atmospheric parameters and annotation. The Auxiliary data used are listed in the Manifest file associated to each product. The Level 2 FR product covers the complete instrument swath. The product duration is not fixed and it can span up to the time interval of the input Level 0/Level 1. Thus the estimated size of the Level 2 FR is dependent on the start/stop time of the acquired segment. During the Envisat mission, acquisition of MERIS Full Resolution data was subject to dedicated planning based on on-demand ordering and coverage of specific areas according to operational recommendations and considerations. See yearly and global density maps to get a better overview of the MERIS FR coverage.
Mission - Heritage Missions
Envisat
Envisat was ESA's successor to ERS. Envisat carried ten instruments aboard for a wide range of Earth observing fields. The mission was operational from 2002 to 2012.