Satellites such as Europe's Copernicus Sentinel missions and ESA's SMOS and the upcoming Florescence Explorer, FLEX, provide a wealth of information about growing conditions and crop health that can be used to improve agricultural efficiency.

In-situ DOMEX-3 measurements for 2016 are now available for Cal/Val users along with the yearly campaign report. The measurements were acquired over the Antarctic plateau close to the Concordia base by tower based L-Band radiometer and by on-ground sensors for snow properties.

ESA would like to inform the SMOS data users that the full reprocessed SMOS level 2 sea surface salinity dataset is now available on the SMOS data dissemination service. Following the reprocessing that finished in May 2017 a "gap-filling" reprocessing was performed to align to the operational product start.

Satellites are helping to predict favourable conditions for desert locusts to swarm, which poses a threat to agricultural production and, subsequently, livelihoods and food security.

New salinity products are available at CATDS (Centre Aval de Traitement des Données SMOS).

A new correction for systematic errors (land-sea and seasonal-latitudinal) has been implemented in CATDS CPDC and in CATDS CEC LOCEAN.

ESA would like to inform that SMOS level 2 sea surface salinity products version v662 are now available to the users.

As planned, the SMOS Nominal Production has been resumed in the morning of 12 May 2017, after the operational deployment of the new L2OS v662 processor.

ESA's SMOS mission maps variations in soil moisture and salt in the surface waters of the open oceans. When the satellite was designed, it was not envisaged that it would be able to measure salinity in smaller seas like the Mediterranean, but SMOS has again surpassed expectations.

Due to the operational deployment of the new L2OS v662 processor, SMOS Level-1 and Level-2 Nominal Production will be stopped on Wednesday, 10 May 2017 at 07:00 UTC.

A planned system maintenance will be affecting the availability of all Earth Observation (EO) SSO services at ESA-ESRIN.

The activity has been scheduled on Thursday 04 May 2017 from 09:00 to 12:00 CEST.