DUJIANGYAN, 13 May 2008, 07h29 (From AFP) - China's biggest earthquake for a generation left tens of thousands dead, missing or buried under the rubble of crushed communities Tuesday, plunging the nation into an all-out aid effort. Troops and rescue teams struggled by air, land and water to reach areas of south-western China stricken by the huge quake that demolished schools, homes and factories. Monday's 7.8-magnitude quake in Sichuan province has killed nearly 10,000 people, according to official tolls, but the figure is expected to rise dramatically with at least 10,000 people reported buried in Mianzhu city alone.

ESA SAR dataset package

ESA makes freely available to the scientific community a dataset of SAR products (Envisat and ERS) corresponding to the major quake of Sichuan (China) which took place in May 2008.

This action aims to promote the ESA SAR data particularly for use in seismology and to highlight the value of the ASAR data archive collected over seismic areas.

1. Users interested by the dataset package can download as indicated below, or alternatively contact the ESA Earth Observation Help Desk
2. In return, users are kindly requested to acknowledge the ESA SAR dataset (Sichuan earthquake 2008) in publications. Users' reports can also be sent directly to the ESA Earth Observation PI team.

The Envisat/ERS SAR data archive in Sichuan, China (please visit the EOLI SA catalogue) contains other acquisitions performed on adjacent tracks or with different ASAR modes. If you wish to order products not belonging to the above Sichuan package (e.g. products in Level 0 format, or different track/mode), please contact the ESA Order Desk as you do regularly for your ESA AO/Cat.1 project.

Data is offered via ftp:

• ftp://us-ext-nas.eo.esa.int
• Directory: /Sichuan_08/earthdata/
• User: earthquake
• Password: earthquake