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.

For all interested users, we kindly remind that the abstract submission and registration deadline of 24 April 2017 for the "Global Ocean Salinity and the Water Cycle Workshop" is approaching.

Although not designed to deliver information on ice, ESA's Earth Explorer SMOS satellite can detect thin sea-ice. Since its cousin, CryoSat, is better at measuring thicker ice scientists have found a way of using these missions together to yield an even clearer picture of the changing Arctic.

A planned system maintenance at ESA-ESRIN will be affecting all Earth Observation (EO) SSO services; the activity has been scheduled on Thursday 15 December from 09:30 to 10:30 CET.