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About Biomass

Biomass

Selected as ESA's seventh Earth Explorer in May 2013, the Biomass mission will provide crucial information about the state of our forests and how they are changing. The data will be used to further our knowledge of the role forests play in the carbon cycle. Biomass will also provide essential support to UN treaties on the reduction of emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

The Biomass launch is expected in 2024 and is planned to be a five-year mission.

Biomass Objectives

The objective of the Biomass mission is to determine the global distribution of forest biomass by reducing the uncertainty in the calculation of carbon stock and fluxes associated with the terrestrial biosphere.

Biomass Instrument

SAR

Biomass will carry, for the first time from space, a P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) instrument to determine the amount of biomass and carbon stored in forests.

Biomass Data

DATA TOOLS

A number of tools are available for visualising, processing and analysing future Biomass data.

ESOV

ESOV - the Earth Observation Swath and Orbit Visualisation tool - provides the means to visualise the instrument swaths of all ESA Earth Observation Satellites and assist in understanding where and when satellite measurements are made and ground contact is possible.

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PolSARpro

PolSARpro (Polarimetric SAR data Processing and Education) supports the scientific exploitation of polarimetric SAR data and is a tool for high-level education in radar polarimetry.




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BioPAL

The Biomass Product Algorithm Laboratory (BioPAL) is an open-source scientific computing project, supporting the development of ESA's Biomass mission algorithms coded in Python.

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