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News  Enter the Dragon: ESA and China's joint Earth watch begins
More than a hundred leading European and Chinese scientists meet today on the island city of Xiamen to commence the Dragon Programme - a wide-ranging research initiative employing ESA Earth Observation data to focus on China. The sheer size and variety of this vast land means that satellites are particularly useful for its study. The 9.6 million square kilometres of Chinese territory range from Himalayan peaks to tropical lowlands. China is home to one in every five humans now alive, and is by some measurements the world's second largest - and single fastest-growing - economy.
The Dragon Programme is a joint undertaking between ESA, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of China and the National Remote Sensing Centre of China (NRSCC). Its purpose is to encourage increased exploitation of ESA space resources within China as well as stimulate increased scientific co-operation in the field of Earth Observation science and technology between China and Europe.
Today is the start of a three-day symposium in Xiamen formally kicking-off the initiative. Participating Sino-European research teams are being joined by ESA Director for Earth Observation Programmes Professor Jose Achache and Mr. Zhang Guocheng, Deputy Director-General of NRSCC.
During the three-year lifetime of the Dragon Programme, data from Envisat as well as other ESA spacecraft will be employed in collaborations between European and Chinese research teams. These fall within thematic areas agreed by ESA and China covering subjects such as rice monitoring and forest mapping, water resources assessment and flood forecasting, air quality measurements and the spread of deserts.
"Subsidence is a problem in many areas within China," says Rocca. "European technologies allow its measurement to the level of millimetres with very low costs, making it an interesting subject for further joint development.
"The Dragon Programme as a whole is valuable because it makes possible closer contacts with China, a giant country with thousands of expert scientists, a well developed space programme and where remote sensing is an important factor for faster and safer development."
Forests cover one seventh of China's land. Radar data such as that provided by Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument can enable more accurate woodland monitoring using InSAR.
When multiple images are combined in this way, forested areas become de-coherent in distinctive signature ways enabling interpreters to classify their canopy height, denseness and even their species.
Similar radar-based techniques will be used for agricultural and rice monitoring. Radar instruments are especially well suited to the latter task because fields have to be flooded during rice's transplantation and growing stages, and radar can distinguish waterlogged ground very well. And radar can see through the clouds that obscure the view of optical satellites above rice-growing areas.
"The probability of acquiring cloud-free optical remote sensing data is only 1% during the crop growing season in Southern China," comments Bingxiang. "This makes it very difficult to carry out real-time monitoring of crop growth and estimate rice yield.
Rice yield prediction models will be tested using inputs from ASAR and also multi-spectral optical data from Envisat's Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS).
Envisat's Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Cartography (SCIAMACHY) will also study seasonal variations of methane emissions from flooded rice fields – useful data for improving the accuracy of climate change models.
Prof. Johnny Johannessen of Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre and Prof. Hui-Jun Wang of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are co-Principal Investigators of a project to study the monsoon and ocean waters it arises from as an interlinked system.
The aim of the project is to improve the ability to monitor and simulate the coupled processes that give rise to China's summer monsoon.
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