As recently announced, the symposium "Earth Explorers for Climate - The contribution from SMOS" will take place in Cornwall, UK, from 18 to 20 March 2020.

The symposium is open to scientists and engineers interested in exploring the capabilities of 10 years of SMOS data, also in synergy with other space or ground based data sources, for climate applications.

Abstract submission and registration interfaces are now both available on the conference website with the following deadlines:

• Deadline for abstract submission: 15 January 2020
• Deadline for registration: 9 March 2020

Since the saltiness of ocean surface waters is a key variable in the climate system, understanding how this changes is important to understanding climate change. Thanks to ESA's Climate Change Initiative, scientists now have better insight into sea-surface salinity with the most complete global dataset ever produced from space.

If you're a keen sea-swimmer, you may have noticed that the water can be saltier in some places than others. This is because the saltiness of the water depends on nearby additions of freshwater from rivers, rain, glaciers or ice sheets, or on the removal of water by evaporation.

The salinity of the ocean surface can be monitored from space using satellites to give a global view of the variable patterns of sea-surface salinity across the oceans.

Unusual salinity levels may indicate the onset of extreme climate events, such as El Niño. Global maps of sea-surface salinity are particularly helpful for studying the water cycle, ocean–atmosphere exchanges and ocean circulation, which are all vital components of the climate system transporting heat, momentum, carbon and nutrients around the globe.

A new easy-to-read guide, ‘10 New Insights in Climate Science' has been presented to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's Executive Secretary, Patricia Espinosa, at the COP25 climate conference.

The report provides an assessment of the key advances that have been made over the last 12 months in understanding the drivers, effects and impacts of climate change, as well as societal responses.

ESA's Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Josef Aschbacher, said, "Understanding the Earth system and how human activity is changing the planet's natural processes is complicated science. However, this report offers a really clear and refreshing way of presenting the facts on climate change.

Despite having completed its mission in orbit over six years ago, ESA's GOCE gravity mapper continues to yield new insights into our planet. Thanks to this extraordinary satellite, scientists now have a much clearer view of the secrets that lie deep below one of the most remote parts of the world: Antarctica. And while the vast expanse of white ice above may appear relatively uniform, it is a very different story below the bedrock.

A layer of ice up to 4 km thick, fierce winds and temperatures that can reach –60°C make Antarctica one of the harshest environments on Earth. This, coupled with the remoteness of this vast icy continent, means that it is difficult and expensive to carry out scientific research, particularly into what lies beneath deep below. Thankfully, data collected from space can offer information that field experiments alone cannot.

A paper, published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, describes how scientists used gravity data from the GOCE satellite mission along with seismological models to reveal unprecedented insight into the crust and upper mantle, otherwise known as the lithosphere, below this frozen continent.