Envisat monitoring China floods as part of Dragon Programme   Acquired on 21 July 2005 as part of the Dragon Programme Rapid Flood Mapping activity, this detail from a Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) Alternating Polarisation Mode (APM) image shows the flooding Nen River in Heilongjiang Province in northeast China. APM mode provides simultaneous acquisitions of data in two polarisations with a swath of 100 kilometres spatial resolution of approximately 150 metres. In this colour composite, red represents HV, green HH and blue HV-HH. The water areas are the darkest signatures, with the river to the south being severely flooded, having a width of around 20 kilometres. Visible as a bright area just east of the Nen River is the city of Qigihar, an important industrial city with a population of 800 000. The land in the vicinity of the Nen River is used for rice and vegetable growing, with the Daqing oil fields located to the east.   Flooding of the Xi River, affecting the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi Province. This Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) Image Mode image was acquired on 25 June 2005, then processed on Santorini Island to be presented during the Dragon Programme Symposium that week. Dark blue indicates reference water, light blue indicates flooded areas and red shows urban areas probably affected.   Flooding of the Xi River, affecting the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi Province, adjacent to the Vietnamese border. This Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) Image Mode image was acquired on 25 June 2005 then processed on Santorini Island during the Dragon Programme Symposium to be presented during the event. The arrows indicate probably flooded areas.   The flooding of Poyang Lake in Jiangxi Province in southern China. An example of crisis near-real time processing, this Envisat Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) Wide Swath Mode image was acquired on 31 May 2005.   The latest Dragon Programme Symposium took place on the Greek island of Santorini between 27 June and 1 July 2005, attended by 120 scientists including 50 from PRC. Progress and early results from the European-Chinese research projects were reported during the event. Dragon at sea     Retrieval of oceanic chlorophyll concentrations - indicating phytoplankton numbers - in coastal waters of the Yellow Sea, from ocean colour of an Envisat Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) image acquired 5 May 2004. The pigment concentration measuring unit is mg/m3.   The Yangtze River has some of the most turbid waters in the world. This MERIS reduced resolution image from 25 May 2005 was processed with BEAM software. It shows the high concentrations of total supended matter at the mouth of the Yangtze River. However, since the present neural network algorithm was limited to 50 mg/l some areas of the Yangtse river have much higher concentrations, i.e. the colour bar at the right end (red9 means 50 mg/l and above.   Nitrogen dioxide air pollution trends for China from 1996 to 2004, as measured by ERS-2's Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME) and Envisat's Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) sensor. Note the high rate of increase over economically-booming Beijing and Shanghai. Release date: 22 February 2008