Latest Global Monitoring for Environment and Security Stories

Two Belgian explorers currently nearing the end of a staggering 2,000 km trek across the Arctic Ocean were recently guided through hazardous conditions using observations from Envisat, as sea ice in the Lincoln Sea began to break up unexpectedly.Throughout the Arctic Arc expedition, which marks the International Polar Year, Alan Hubert and Dixie Dansercoer have been collecting snow-depth data for ESA's CryoSat-2 mission. As seasoned polar explorers, they are used to dealing with the extremely...

The origin and movement of waves reaching up to 11 metres that devastated France's Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean on Saturday evening have been detected with ESA's Envisat satellite.The waves that thrashed the southern port of Saint Pierre, leaving two fishermen missing, causing several piers to collapse and flooding several homes and businesses, originated south of Cape Town, South Africa, and travelled northeast for nearly 4000 km over a period of three days before slamming into Reunion...

Launched from Kourou in French Guiana on the night of 28 February 2002, ESA's Envisat spacecraft marks its fifth year in space. Having orbited Earth more than 26,000 times, the world's largest and most complex environmental satellite ever launched has travelled a distance of more than 1,000,000,000 kilometres, nearly the equivalent of travelling to Jupiter and back.Generating some 280 Gigabytes of data products daily, Envisat has gathered 500 Terabytes to date. The amount of data returned by...

Within the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) framework, sustainable management of forests is recognised as an important challenge - one objective that will be addressed with the planned Sentinel-2 mission. As part of the mission's preparatory activities, scientists have been conducting experiments in a mountainous region of the Czech Republic to help design a new procedure for retrieving precise data on the health of spruce forests. Since the spring of 2005, scientists...

The most authoritative report on climate change to date will be released tomorrow in Paris, France, and is expected to warn of rising global sea levels and temperatures. Earth observation from space plays an invaluable role in helping scientists advance our understanding of climate change and capability to model its evolution.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) developed the report, "˜Climate Change 2007', over six years with a panel of 2 500 scientific expert reviewers from...

By absorbing half of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere, the oceans have a profound influence on climate. However, their ability to take up this carbon dioxide might be impaired as a result of climate change. To determine their response to global warming, ESA has backed two projects that provide systematic data on key oceanic variables "“ colour and temperature. The Medspiration project, aimed at charting sea-surface temperatures, and the GlobCOLOUR project, aimed at...

Excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation is responsible for up to 60,000 deaths a year worldwide, according to a report released this summer by the World Health Organisation. Many of those deaths, however, could be avoided through simple preventive measures such as seeking shade when the UV Index is high, the report says.Thanks to an innovative service called HappySun, the UV Index can be delivered directly to mobile phones via SMS or can be accessed on the Internet. HappySun calculates...

ESA -- For more than a decade space-based radar instruments have been routinely observing ocean surface phenomena including wind, waves, oil slicks, even the eyes of hurricanes. Now "“ employing the same principle as police speed guns "“ satellite radar has also begun to enable direct measurements of the speed of the moving ocean surface itself.The oceans that cover 71% of the Earth's surface are constantly in motion. Ocean surface currents can lead to strong interaction with wind and...

ESA -- Since its launch in 2002, Envisat, the world's largest and most sophisticated satellite ever built, has been providing scientists and operational users with invaluable data for global monitoring and forecasting "“ and the future looks even brighter. "The Envisat mission has reached its full maturity with the services provided by the satellite now well established, and the scientific results based on its data being increasing published," Envisat Mission Manager Henri Laur...

ESA -- The deadly Indian Ocean tsunami that swept across coastlines on December 26, 2004 took the lives of more than 200,000 people. The sheer scale of the catastrophe meant that Earth Observation was vital both for damage assessment and for co-ordinating emergency activities. Through the year that followed, satellite-based maps from ESA's Respond consortium continued to support rebuilding efforts. Space-based assistance is being provided through Global Monitoring for Environment and...