Space-based sensors help detect otherwise invisible changes, peering either sideways or down through the atmosphere to build up three-dimensional views of its chemical composition, sensitive to a few parts per billion.
The Copernicus Sentinel-5P mission is dedicated to monitor the atmosphere and its TROPOMI sensor is capable of measuring atmospheric constituents.
Each year, about a quarter of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere ends up in the ocean, but how it happens is still not fully understood. The Sentinel-3A satellite is poised to play an important role in shedding new light on this exchange.
The current El Niño weather phenomenon is taking its toll on coral reefs, prompting a field campaign to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to explore how Europe's Sentinel-2 satellite might be able to quantify the damage on a large scale.
A large volcanic OClO and BrO plume could be tracked from ENVISAT SCIAMACHY jointly with EOS Aura MLS and OMI observations for 5 days after the June 2011 eruption of Puyehue-Cordón Caulle (PCC).
Mesoscale marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) phenomena are frequently observed by satellite sensors. They appear either as organised cloud patterns in visible-infrared satellite images or as coherent patterns on the sea surface in microwave synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images.
Like thermometers in the sky, satellite instruments can measure the temperatures of Earth's surfaces. ESA's new GlobTemperature project is merging these data from a variety of spaceborne sensors to provide scientists with a one-stop shop for land, lake and ice temperature data.
A new fire detection algorithm ALGO3, has been tested and validated for ATSR-1/-2 and AATSR. This extends the ATSR World Fire Atlas (WFA) to 21 years of night-time fire series.
The potential of GMES for crisis management and environmental monitoring is highlighted in a new publication with users demonstrating the importance of Earth observation data to European regions.
