Observing Earth

Europe has just endured its second warmest winter on record. Much of southern and western Europe has been affected by substantial anomalies of soil moisture owing to this exceptionally dry and warm winter. Data from ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission have been used to monitor the low levels of soil moisture across Europe.

Image: Part of southern Italy is featured in this wintery image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Honouring individual scientists and teams of scientists that have contributed to the innovative use of Earth observation data, ESA and the European Geosciences Union (EGU) are happy to announce the winners of this year’s prestigious Excellence Award.

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image features the diverse landscape surrounding Monterrey, the capital of the northeast state of Nuevo León, Mexico.

The final instalment of the sixth assessment report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released today. The report warns that the planet has already warmed 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, resulting in more frequent and intense extreme weather events that are causing increasingly dangerous impacts on nature and people in every region of the world. The report includes a greater contribution of Earth observation data than its previous iterations in providing the physical evidence of Earth’s changing climate system – from sea-level rise, growing greenhouse-gas emissions and melting sea ice.

Image: Botswana’s Okavango Delta – the world’s largest inland delta – is featured in this multitemporal radar image, captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission.

Video: 00:04:58 The pressure is on to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere – but the race is also on to support the monitoring that shows if targets are being met. Being developed by ESA on behalf of the EU, the new Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring mission, or CO2M for short, is destined to be Europe’s prime mission for monitoring and tracking carbon dioxide emissions from human activity. CO2M is currently planned as a two-satellite mission, each of which will carry a near-infrared and shortwave-infrared spectrometer to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide at high spatial resolution. Engineers at Thales SESO in France explain how the development of some of the mission’s precision measuring and optical components is going.

Image: The icy landscape of Graham Coast, which lies on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.