|
|
News  ESA celebrates 15 years of near-real time data delivery in Earth Observation
Decision-makers, scientists and local authorities require up-to-date environmental information in order to manage natural resources, respond to natural disasters and better understand climate change. ESA has been responding to this requirement since 1992 by offering data from Earth-observing satellites in near-real time to allow users to study and monitor the current state of the oceans, lands, atmosphere and cryosphere. At the end of the commissioning phase of ESA’s ERS-1 satellite in early 1992, the space agency began disseminating oceanographic data of the satellite’s onboard instruments to users through a network of landlines. Many of these data were re-formatted in near-real time for compatibility with end-users connected to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) network.
As the need for timely information increased for environmental forecasting and disaster response, ESA sought to speed up its data flow by making use of emerging technologies. By the time ESA launched ERS-2 in 1995, the space agency was readily using the Internet to deliver data from more sophisticated instruments, such as the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME).
The need for near-real time data delivery has continued to increase over the last 10 years as a consequence of the incredible progress in Information Technology; the power of computers and the growth in network bandwidths and storage capacities have resulted in Earth observation (EO) users requesting larger volumes of data to be delivered in unprecedented time frames.
In an effort to meet these demands and deal with the vast amount of near-real time data produced by Envisat, the world’s largest Earth-observing satellite launched by ESA in 2002, ESA upgraded its data delivery method to the quicker Data Dissemination System (DDS), which also uses telecommunication satellites. In addition, as the ESA mandate for delivering EO data expanded to non-ESA missions (Third Party Missions), the various European centres delivering EO data were interconnected through large communication networks.
Today’s Earth check-up provides access to daily worldwide fire maps, UV radiation levels, ozone forecasts and daily sea surface temperatures.
The latest ESA near-real time capability added to the Earth check-up is MIRAVI, short for MERIS Images RApid Visualisation. MIRAVI, which debuted last December, allows people unfamiliar with EO data to track natural events in progress, such as fires, floods and volcanic eruptions, or simply explore the planet through the eyes of a satellite. Although the MIRAVI images are fascinating and provide the marvellous feeling that users are ‘onboard the satellite’, scientists prefer to use the complete MERIS products, which are also available through near-real time servers, for research purposes.
In the next months, ESA will further expand its range of EO data available in near-real time to scientists by allowing them easy access to large amounts of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and MERIS data, particularly over Europe.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
